some inadequate sentences

Babbanne died on Thursday.

Such a simple, awful sentence.

My father’s mother passed away, five years after he and his older brother died, and my relatives keep saying they couldn’t believe it, her strength, how did she last so long? My grandmother… ah ya Allah, how to write this, how to describe her infinite light?

I can’t ask so much of language.

I love her so much. She loved me so much. Everyone knew, everyone saw it. I think, in part, our connection was so strong and intense because we met both later in life, and first.

The first meeting in my memory I was an awkward teenager being introduced to my Turkish family, in her housing commission flat in Mascot. My grandfather was there, too, a huge man, bald, with a short white beard and an intense stare. He died shortly afterward, and I never met him again, so what I have of him is his eyes, and his abrupt declaration that I must be a doctor.

Babbanne—her name was Yurdanur Celic Balicok—outlived him by over a decade, outlived two daughters and two sons. She told me that I was brought to her as a baby; my mother left me to my father, who left me with her for several weeks, and for those weeks, she was the only love I knew, and I would crawl after her wherever she went. She loved me, wanted to keep me, but I was taken away, to my mother’s sister, so as not to embarrass my father’s wife, and my aunty raised me for the first six years of my life. And so for most of two decades my grandma mourned me, and loved me, and I knew nothing of her until that meeting.

I came to her as an adult, and for years thereafter, I’d visit her every Sunday, as I used to visit my Arab grandparents when they lived. Every time she saw me her face “lit up”; I’m sure you know this phrase, but I doubt you have seen its reality the way I have; she was living proof of the soul, the animus of spirit, her incandescence was undeniable. All that banked up love met all my banked-up need for love and so I can only describe our every interaction as solace, as salve, grace made manifest. “You my heart,” she would say, over and over, her eyes twinkling despite my uncle’s outraged objections.

The past three months have been agonising. Her stroke robbed her of speech, of her fierce independence and mobility. It was unbearably cruel to witness. She lasted so long afterward I dared to begin hoping for recovery, but it was not to be, and this proved crushing all over again. My uncle tried calling me the morning of her passage, then sent a message saying she was on her last breaths. “She is dying.”

I got an Uber straight to the hospital, cursing its slowness. I arrived and was taken to the Resuscitation bay. She was in room one, my uncle and aunty were there, some cousins, Babbanne’s sister too, all of them weeping. Babbanne was in the bed, her jaw slack, short fast rasping breaths coming in and out, eyes wide open but unseeing, her face already set in the waxy, almost wooden state of death. I went over to her, I kissed her clammy-warm forehead, I held her hand, I whispered in her ear over and over I love you, it’s okay, I love you, we’ll be okay, it’s okay, I love you, it’s okay, it's okay, it’s okay, stroking her soft white hair, and she blinked, her eyes wet, she looked at me, saw me, and then closed her eyes. Stopped breathing. I whispered the Fatiha in her ears.

I was the last view she had in this life. She had waited for me, then, finally, she let go.

The letting go took ten minutes still; her breathing started again, a whisper, her mouth open, but chest unmoving. My uncle, between sobbing, would say “Is she gone? Is she gone? Omer, is she gone?” repeatedly, until someone clumsily checked her pulse or breathing. Between consoling him, and my aunty, and great-aunty—who was shouting in Turkish that this was her mother, her mother, not her sister—I stroked Babbanne’s shoulder, whispering over and over that it was okay, crying of course, but as quietly as I could, trying not to hurt so much so obviously, trying not to unravel completely, not out of any aversion to sorrow or emotion, public or otherwise but because that is not what she needed.

The grieving often think that they are going through the hardest thing, the grieving can be oblivious and obnoxious in the midst of their loss, but the hardest thing is death, the hardest thing is letting go of this life, especially for Babbanne, who all her life was the pillar of the family, the workhorse who took care of everyone, who worried endlessly about the children she was leaving behind, even though those children were grandparents themselves now, still she worried, and they were in hysterics, so how could her soul leave in peace? How could she let go?

Everyone said afterward that she waited for me to come before she left, my god look how much she loved you and while my heart agrees, another part of me wonders if she was just waiting for someone to say it was okay, that we would all be okay, she could go. I kissed her forehead again at 9:47am, it was cool, and I knew then she was gone, because I have kissed my father’s cold forehead and my mother’s mother’s forehead, and I know what the departure of a spirit feels like on my lips. The doctors confirmed it a few minutes later.

I’m in more pain than I know how to say. I’m so happy she’s gone and doesn’t have to experience anymore the pains that bothered her, physically and emotionally. We buried her the following day, a bright humid Friday, but holy despite all that; she was washed in the same centre as her son my father, and we prayed over her at Auburn Mosque like we did him, and buried her in Rookwood, in the new Muslim section, like him, and I lowered her body into the grave, into my uncle’s arms, like him, and grief is savaging my heart with its repetition. My solace, my softest hours, my Sunday is gone and my week will always be a day shorter, time will always be distorted beyond repair now.

May God bless her forever and ever, ameen.