When Grief is Labor

The day before Dad died, he asked me for a favor. He was sitting up in his bed at the assisted living facility in Aubervilliers, a northern suburb of Paris. His olive green eyes looked gently in my direction. His skin had paled and his once round cheeks now showed the sharpness of his cheekbones.
 In an adjacent Parisian suburb, there’s an indoor skydiving facility. The website shows people in skintight leotards inside a kind of tube. A blast of air comes out of the ground and pushes them upward. The people in the video smile as they float, parallel to the ground, arms and legs spread wide just a few feet in the air. I dialed the number on his phone, turned on the speakerphone and held it up to his mouth.
The man on the other side of the phone answered, and Dad, his voice frail from fatigue, asked if he could set up an appointment to go indoor skydiving.
“Absolutely.”
“There’s one thing,” Dad followed up. “I’m in a wheelchair.”
“Not a problem,” the man said.
I nudged Dad, “Tell him the other thing.”
“Oh, I had shoulder surgery ten years ago.”
“Ah. Then, I’m sorry, sir. You can’t fly.”
Dad persisted, calmly. He argued that the surgery was a long time ago. He would sign any papers that wouldn’t hold the facility accountable. Then, he tried one more gamble.
“I’ve rappelled from helicopters with the American Marines.” Dad had been a photojournalist. While covering the Civil War in Lebanon, he joined the American Marines as they jumped out of helicopters over Beirut.
 The man asked if that was recently. Dad hesitated then answered. “No, but it wasn’t that long ago.” Just thirty years before his shoulder surgery. The employee was unmoved, so Dad admitted defeat, thanked him and hung up. I promised him we’d look for other alternatives. A little bit later, I gave him a hug, kissed his forehead, and said goodbye. 

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It has been a few months now since Dad has passed away. I sat next to him on his last day. Unconscious, I held his hand as he took his last breaths in the hospital. I was alone until my partner arrived in the late afternoon. She’d been visiting a cousin in Burgundy. Less than a half hour after she arrived, Dad took his last breath. She likes to believe Dad was waiting for her to arrive, so I wouldn’t be alone.
Before Dad passed, I used to wake up, pack my bag and jet out the door. I’d take line 12 to the terminus. Then I’d walk about fifteen minutes through the winding streets of Aubervilliers, passing an assortment of kebab shops, fast food restaurants and barbers, to his assisted living facility. I’d put on a mask, sign in, and take the elevator to the fifth floor.
Throughout his illness, Dad was indefatigable. Even as his walking power waned – he went from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair – his enthusiasm and drive never diminished. I would visit him at his home, hoping to sit with him and chat. Instead, he’d shuffle around relentlessly. He’d be rearranging things from one room to another, possibly cooking or trying to put together a new piece of furniture, which even at his physical peak he struggled to do properly.
In his last days, Dad didn’t get out of bed much. His head faced away from the door, so he never saw who was entering his room. When I came in, he’d turn gingerly. And when he saw it was me, he might smile and ask for a hug. Some days, if something had kept him up during the night, which was often, he’d still be asleep. I’d work next to him as he rested. On my lunch break, I’d help him eat lunch.
On good days, he’d ask for help sitting on the chair by his bed and look through his email or Facebook on his laptop or iPad. He had once been a master of these devices. Unlike most kids, Dad helped me with technology rather than vice versa. When his strength and coordination started to give way, so did his ability to control such devices. But, he would still patiently tap away at these screens, repeating a habit through the little muscle memory he had left. 
Occasionally, if the weather was nice enough, I’d get him in his wheelchair, and we’d go to his residence’s garden to chat or across the street for a coffee. One time, I took him by the canal and lit him a joint. He called me the next day to say he’d never slept so well.
Despite his limited energy, he was almost always mentally sharp. We talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about the global elections, or about the latest thing Trump had done. Dad hated Trump. His sense of humor hardly wavered either. He’d tell me stories of funny encounters with the staff, like when a nurse passing by his open door mistook his shaking arm (from illness) for masturbation. “Mr. Salhani, stop that, it’s disgusting.” We laughed together. Still, these moments were taxing. I came home most days exhausted. My performance at work slipped, and relationships with friends and my partner weren’t given as much care as they needed. 
Since his passing, I tend to lay in bed a bit longer. When I wake up, I shower and get dressed like a normal day. But, my body feels different now. Less tense, maybe. But also like my bones, tendons, muscles, and ligaments weigh a bit more than before. 
When my mother passed, six years earlier, I felt a panging guilt. My mind replayed every argument we’d ever had and every time I hadn’t phoned her to check in. Many things were left unsaid. After that, I tried my best with Dad to have no regrets. At the start of 2022, Dad was checked into the hospital. He was struggling to breathe -- a byproduct of an infection caused by his worsening Parkinson’s disease -- but he fought through short breaths to talk to me. 
“Tell me three things that you don’t like about me and three things that you do,” he said. I told him to go first. “I think you can be a bit self-centered at times,” he said. What else? “That’s it. That’s the only thing. Everything else I like. Your turn.” 
I told him I felt like he didn’t take my feelings into consideration at times. “What else?” That’s it, really. Math was never our family’s strong point. Then I told him three things I liked about him.
“I like that you don’t hold onto your anger.”
“I like that I don’t ever have doubts over if you are proud of me.”
“I like that your love genuinely feels unconditional.”
I don’t know if that’s exactly what I said. My dad was in the hospital, and I wasn’t taking notes. But, in the months after I said these things and many other things like that, we kept no secrets. That moment in the hospital was our mutual confession.
After three weeks in the hospital, he was released to go back home. The diagnosis had been that food was going down the wrong path, landing in his lungs and causing an infection. He was advised to eat less solid food. Before heading home, he told me he was committed to doing what it took to avoid getting another infection. Once back at his assisted living residence, a member of the staff brought him his welcome home meal: a tray of various purees. Dad took one small spoonful of something green (probably peas) before recoiling in horror. “I can’t eat this, it’s disgusting.” Later, he apologized.
And as the months passed, I saw him grow weaker. At one point, a few weeks before his last breaths, I looked at him and took stock. The tendons and bones in his legs looked like they’d been wrapped in a thin layer of skin. His hand movements were labored and imprecise. Even if he got better, what would “better” look like? Sometimes, when he was having a particularly rough day of pain, I might lose my composure and shed tears by his bedside. If he noticed, he’d look up at me and tell me to be strong. 
My mourning started well before his passing. In some ways, our relationship was completely confined to his residence or the phone. We sat together in his living residence but didn’t go to restaurants anymore or visit relatives. He never saw the inside of my apartment in Paris. But now that he has passed, that slowly accumulating absence has become complete. Before I can grieve, however, there is work to be done.

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At first there is much to do. Carine, my partner, and I have to contact the phone company and his banks in the US and France. We need to cancel his internet and a myriad of subscriptions he’d accumulated in recent years. We also have to plan the funeral. And because the assisted living residence is paid per day, we have to quickly pack up his room and figure out what to do with his things.
Like all the days before Dad passed, we take the line 12 to the last stop and walk the quarter of an hour to his residence. We pass the fast food shops and the barbers. The ritual isn’t broken yet. I’m worried that walking into his room without him in it will be difficult. I mostly take deep breaths and release all the words I can’t bring myself to say in sighs.
I keep all the photographs, including the ones of him hanging on his wall. He has one arm in arm with Yasser Arafat in Beirut. Arafat’s in his traditional checkered kūfiyyih, and Dad has a camera hanging around his neck. The photo is signed “To Claude.” There’s another that Bill Clinton took at the White House Correspondents’ dinner that shows Dad and a few other journalists at the main table. He never hung the photo he took of a man dressed in US Marine garb, wiping a tear from behind a barricade, that got him nominated for a Pulitzer in 1983, but I have a copy somewhere at home. I also keep the Yemeni daggers and the Persian carpets he dragged with him around the world. We donate the clothes – dress shirts in solid colors of blue, purple and pink that he hasn’t worn in years – and go through a big stack of documents collected over a lifetime. There are medical papers from Italy, an old record of a house sale from West Virginia, and media badges from Baku, Astana, Cairo, and Beirut. 
On the second day of cleaning Dad’s room, my phone rings. On the other end, I hear a voice work though sobs to whisper my name. It’s Dad’s primary caretaker at the residence. I’ll call her J. She has been working at a different facility the last couple of days and has just found out about Dad’s passing. We give each other soft condolences.
J is boisterous, sometimes to the point where she veers on the chaotic and has an irrepressible optimism. Dad used to say J was a pain in his neck. They had tiffs from time to time. J can be stubborn. Also, she is overworked, underpaid, and her job – which sees her care for many residents older and more senile than Dad – is relentless. Dad’s loss of physical agency had him frustrated. He was stubborn too. This would boil over into tension. I would tell Dad he needs to apologize and have empathy for someone the labor system doesn’t adequately value. He would always relent and apologize. Those words would cure all. J would smile wide and give him a kiss on the forehead. I later found out that caretakers at Dad’s residence rotate floors in the facility every six months, but J’s tenure on Dad’s floor was extended so that she could continue working with him.
The whole process of cleaning out Dad’s place takes us a week. And, when we’re done, I sign a paper declaring the room vacant of his belongings. I’ve had many horrible moments here. The hardest was when he would drift in and out of lucidity due to pain. He would grit his teeth and grimace. One time, it lasted hours as I pleaded with the staff to give him more Doliprane or even a bit of Morphine. Just to ease his suffering. In this particular fit, he looked at me and asked, “Where’s Cindy?” Cindy was my mother’s name. A minute or two later he regained lucidity. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” 
Yet, there were also moments of beauty.  There was the time we talked about our hopes for the future. Dad spoke about hoping to get out of bed and walk again. Where Dad sang zajal to me, or after years of deflection he finally shared his feelings about his own father. The daily ritual of coming here is over. I’ve heard the saying “hope kills,” but hope also gives life. His undying hope kept him next to me for a few more months. I hope that he is at peace now. I hope there is a heaven, and he can see my mom and his friends and family that have passed away. And, I hope that I never have to come back here again.

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The funeral passes smoothly. My uncle and his wife attend. So do a few of Dad’s friends. J got the time wrong but joined us for drinks after. As the days pass, people go back to their normal routines. But my normal routine involves line 12, signing in to the assisted living facility, and pulling up a chair next to Dad. Now, I don’t go to the suburbs anymore. My world feels a bit smaller. I used to wish I had more free time, so I could pick up a book or write things. I reread Dad’s memoir from his start as a journalist at Annahar in 1970 until his last time in the field during Desert Storm. I was four or five years old when he was in Kuwait covering the Iraqi invasion. He’d call home, but I would refuse to speak to him on the phone, angry that he’d left me for war. I made him promise that he wouldn’t go to any more wars. He relented, and after a dozen different conflicts in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Cyprus, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond he stopped being a war reporter for me. While reading, I hear his voice. When I finish, I try to pick up another book, but while I read the words individually, they disintegrate, unable to form any collective meaning.
Unable to read, I type “games” into Google. I start playing a mindless first person shooter on my web browser. I’ve never played video games much. But the drill of gunfire drowns out any thoughts and numbs my mind.
The funeral’s over and people go back to their lives. Conversations with friends and colleagues are about work again, or the series on Netflix we are binge-watching, or where our next vacation will be. French people talk a lot about vacations. But I can’t focus on the Game of Thrones spin off or the Lord of the Rings spin off or The Addams Family spin off. Or the prequel. Or the remake. Or whatever. I have brain fog. I think this must also happen to others who lose their parents. I had brain fog when my mom died, and Carine says she got it when her father died. I don’t know the best way to describe it but I will try:
I loved and was loved. That love’s entropy propelled me forward through time. And now I have to walk the Earth without this love. The passing of time feels uneven. It juts and spurts in all directions. I’m left feeling blurry, out of focus. My outline is being dragged forward through time while the rest of me is frozen in my last moment with Dad. 
Stuck between places, I can’t reach Dad. And I can’t reach other people either. People share information, but like the words on the page they dissolve quickly. Comprehension isn’t the problem. It’s connecting empathetically to what’s being said that is the hard part. I worry that if I don’t properly work through my grief, it will leave a human part of me behind.

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I meet a new contact for coffee. He tells me about a magazine taking pitches on labor and idleness. He encourages me to pitch. I’ve not written much professionally in recent weeks. But I’ve been writing in a journal, which is something I’ve never done consistently over the years. And I start to think about the labor I’m putting into grieving. 
I read poems on grief by Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, and W.S. Merwin. I read journalistic articles that research dealing with grief. I read book reviews that criticize books about grief. And I read medical articles on complex grief and the stages of grief.
Sigmund Freud set the ground for what has become known as “grief work.” Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross later outlined the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. According to psychologists, these stages aren’t clean or linear. I don’t know which stage or stages I’m dealing with. All I feel is brain fog. Sometimes, when I focus, I feel overwhelming sadness. 
Meanwhile, I still have to do my day job. All this additional reading and writing is being done outside of work hours. But the hours in the job, a job I’ve held and at times loved for three years, feels less meaningful than before. I guess everything does. I tell myself I need to focus on grieving. But instead, I open my laptop and play the shooter game. 
Time has lost its sense to me. I feel I’ve not moved but that a millennium has passed by. Sands have shifted and memories have faded. When my mom died, sometimes I questioned if she had ever been alive. Her absence felt so permanent as though she was an uncasted character in a movie – only ever referred to by name. But I strongly felt the presence of Dad’s absence. I had no doubts he’d ever been by my side.
Ten days or ten thousand days after the funeral, I go to pick up Dad’s ashes from the crematorium. Most people sitting in the waiting room are probably miserable. After a few minutes, someone calls my name. I step forward and they take me into another room. Maybe for privacy from the other mourners. They hand me an urn and ask if I want a box. I’m not sure how to answer. I don’t have much experience in carrying ashes. I ask for a box, since I have to ride the metro home. And the crematorium employee pushes it into a tall, ill-fitting gray rectangle with velvet texture. None of this – the box’s color or texture or the fact Dad’s remains are in here – makes any sense.
I walk out of the facility and into a sea of graves. I think about a particular photo of Dad and me from when I was a baby. He is dressed in a Jordanian robe with a black and white keffiyeh around his head. I’m also wearing a (much smaller) keffiyeh. I’m small enough for Dad to balance me on his leg and hold me with his one arm. 
When I was around five years old, I would run, not walk, to my parents’ room in the middle of the night. I’d stand patiently next to Dad’s side of the bed until he’d wake up and see me. Then he’d use his two arms to lift me up and lay me next to him in bed.
When Dad got older and sicker, I’d use the remote on his medical bed to put him in a position where I could turn his body and fragile legs with my two arms. He’d grunt, “You’re killing me.” But when all was done, he’d smile and say, “That’s good. That’s good.”
In his last few days, he tried to catch an ephemeral moment with his phone camera. The evening sunlight would hit the golden details of a Phoenician statue on his bookshelf for just a couple of minutes. I’d use my two hands to help steady the arms of a Pulitzer-nominated photographer and take the last photos of his life.
Now, as I walk past gray tombstones and manicured grass in a late Parisian summer, I’m carrying his remains in my one arm. Tears catch the inside of my sunglasses as I power through the steps to take home what remains of Dad. I will find a place for him on the shelf in my bedroom next to my mom’s remains.

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Dad’s degradation was gradual. In the later years of his life, I was also the only person who he saw on a daily basis that wasn’t employed by his residence. His siblings and daughter, my sister, live an ocean away. I often had to wear that burden while trying to be a partner to Carine, whose family is mostly still in Lebanon. But his reliance on me wasn’t without reciprocity. A couple weeks before he passed, Dad told me he’d had a rough morning. “I thought I might die, but I told myself, ‘no, Justin needs you.’” And I did. I do. 
“You’re a great son,” the workers at his residence would often tell me. Most of the residents rarely get visitors, if at all. 
“You’re my savior,” Dad told me on more than one occasion.
I’m often unsure if I’m a good writer or a good journalist. Or a good friend. Or a good partner. I try, but doubt creeps in. I’m inconsistent in everything. Except one thing. I was a good son. And since the day Dad took his last breath, I’m not a son anymore. All my parents and grandparents have passed away. There is no one walking the earth who I am a direct descendant of. The link to history has been severed. Losing Dad is losing the stories he told. The steps he walked before me. 
My therapist suggests I do an EMDR with a therapist in Paris. I say that I’ll look for one, but I put it off and play the shooter game more frequently. When Dad was young, he went on a Che Guevara-inspired motorcycle trip around Lebanon. Along the way, he saw levels of poverty that deeply impacted his politics and worldview. Still, Dad always told me he thought I was more radical. I don’t like hierarchy or authority, but in this game I reach the rank of captain.

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Work asks if I’m interested in attending an event in Cairo. This feels somewhat serendipitous. Dad was born in Cairo and lived there until the age of 9 or 10.
My aunt sends me their old address in Heliopolis. I find it and look up at the building’s tan walls and closed shutters. The modest balconies are mostly empty except for an occasional plant.
In recent trips to Lebanon, before Dad passed, I found my great grandmother’s death record at the Syriac Catholic church in Beirut. I went into the building in Hamra where he grew up and took videos of his old apartment. I spoke to Melhem, the owner of the dikāna outside. He has worked there for at least fifty years. His eyes lit up when I told him who I was. “Claude, the journalist?” Dad once FaceTimed me while I was there and spoke to Melhem about family and lost time.
In Egypt, outside his childhood apartment, there is no feeling of connection to history that I was hoping for. Just emptiness and loss. He’s not there. His shadow hasn’t danced on those walls in over sixty years.
I had realized just weeks before his death that Dad had crossed a threshold. His Parkinson’s was slowly eroding his body and spirit. He wasn’t going to get much better. In the days after he passed, there was a sense that with his death came a sense of mercy. Maybe it was better he had departed now before his abilities became even more impaired, but that gave me little respite.

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I’m sitting in the back of a cafe on a sofa, or maybe a futon. I’m back in Paris. People sit at tables with laptops or coffee in hand, chatting. I’m actually here for the EMDR session. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and is often suggested to people who are suffering from trauma.  But before you face your trauma, you have to sit in a waiting room, at least for this particular therapist, in the back of this lightly colored and well lit cafe in Paris’ 10th arrondissement. 
After a few minutes, a blond woman with kind features, close in age to me, appears and asks me to follow her up a narrow spiral staircase. She asks me why I have sought out EMDR, and I explain. She nods and asks me to lay down on a patient chair. It feels quick, but I acquiesce. I’ll later find out that this type of therapy generally requires numerous sessions before actually getting to the patient-chair segment.
She asks me to start by thinking of a happy memory. I think of my wedding day a little over six years earlier. The happiest moment of my life was walking outside the small chapel and embracing friends and family. Each hug felt significant, an expression of love. All our parents were there, and we had no idea two would be gone by our one-year anniversary. Dad bawled during the ceremony. And after, outside the chapel, I embraced my parents warmly, one by one.
Then we move on to the bad memories. I start with Dad. I see him in pain. I see his labored breathing. I see him lying in a hospital bed, unconscious, as the air slowly departs his lungs for the last time. As she asks me to envision this, she waves a pen back and forth in front of my eyes. “Follow the pen,” she says. “And repeat a phrase. Something that you feel.”
I do this for Dad, my mother, my grandmother, but I don’t feel much other than numbness. I’m more concerned that her arm is getting tired. I tell her, and she laughs and tells me not to worry. She does arm-strengthening specifically for this. She suggests I close my eyes and try talking to my parents, one by one. I talk to my mother and I tell her I miss her. I see her face, unaged, still in her early 60s. I tell her that even six years after her death, I still have the urge to share things with her. And I tell her I’m sorry for the burdens she carried through her life that she didn’t deserve, and I never acknowledged. 
Then, the therapist asks me to talk to Dad. I tell him that it’s been hard since he isn’t around anymore. That I don’t know what to do with myself. I tell him that I know I’ll be okay, but I’m not okay right now. I can’t imagine waking up every day for the coming decades without giving him a phone call or a hug. And now, warm tears start to run down my cheeks and my breathing becomes labored. The dam breaks, and my hands cover my eyes. I cough out broken breaths. It’s out of my control. Time passes. I don’t know how much. A couple minutes or maybe decades. Trees shed leaves, flowers wilt and regrow, people go to work and home again, but I remain in place, stuck in this moment.
My breathing regulates eventually. I open my eyes and the therapist gives me a sympathetic smile. She tells me that when we close our eyes, picture a person and speak to them, our brain believes they are actually with us. It’s a trick of sorts. Maybe for the first time, I feel more in union with my grief. Things are slowly coming back into focus.
I pay the therapist and thank her. I walk down the spiral steps back into the end of the cafe. All the same patrons are here from an hour earlier. I step into the bathroom and look in the mirror. My eyes are red and puffy. I splash some water on my face, but there’s no change. I start to contemplate how long I can hide out in a cafe/therapy waiting room bathroom. I decide I’d rather be outside, so I tuck my chin, look down and propel through the cafe into the warm fall afternoon.
When I get home later in the day, I sit down at my laptop. I open the shooter game. I stare at the screen for a moment but then close the laptop. 
In the coming days, I will start to try something different. I sit alone in the bedroom and play music and try to take deep breaths. I set a timer for around ten minutes. Sometimes I talk to Dad. Most times, I can’t fight back the tears. I’m trying to feel this grief. I want to feel this sadness and to labor through it. My fingers contort and grab at my chest as it heaves. My teeth grind. I’m not okay. But sitting with my sadness and loss feels better than wandering through days without addressing it. The brain fog dissipates, briefly, and things become slightly more in focus.
 The  timer rings. I splash away the teary runways on my face. I think about how when certain plants are unable to see the sun, they grow in a new trajectory until they feel the warmth of sunlight again. Dad is gone. I’m on a new trajectory without him.
I step out for a coffee, into the sunlight.