For months, before she had even died, the room reeked of death. No one said anything about it. The smell was like rotting fish and overwhelmingly present. Years before a diagnosis was given – before a diagnosis was possible – her daughter would joke that she had all kinds of illnesses we would never learn about because she never went to a doctor. And so I imagine that her lungs were rotting and the wound on her chest was bleeding and I was asleep on the floor under her bed, breathing it in. I was still the love of her life then. I could not imagine being anything else.

Every night is a different kind of awful, and I get used to it.

One night, she gets up from her lawn chair which is placed inside what is now the Sick Room. She walks to the bathroom, and something falls from underneath her shirt. She does not notice because she cannot breathe and needs to immediately be hooked up to her oxygen machine. I notice because I am not dying. I pick up the object, and it is gauze full of blood, and then she is yelling at me to drop it, to wash my hands, to please not touch it, illness is impurity. That is the first time I learned about the bleeding.

Another night we are in the living room on the only couch that does not hurt her back. I ask the kind of useless questions a healthy person asks to make themself feel useful: Are you comfortable? (She never was.) Are you hungry? (She never was.) Can I do something? (I never could.) It is 3am and we are the only ones awake. I notice the dirt on the soles of her swollen feet, because she no longer wears shoes, because she no longer leaves the house. I decide to get a small plastic tub to wash her feet. I fill a red tub with water and shampoo and carry it into the living room. I sit on the floor near her and gingerly place her feet in the water. I wonder if it feels good. I begin to gently, gently, gently wash the soles of her feet, and she pretends to enjoy it. She gives me a weak smile. I think about what we would look like to a stranger and I get the undeniable sense that what I am doing is the most important thing I will ever do. Is there something holy about washing a dying person’s feet? I decide to wash the feet of everyone I love, like a crazed, sleep-deprived night nurse. I think about how I will always remember the feeling of her not-yet-dead feet in my very alive hands. I am then struck by the fact that her feet feel like any other. ; How unfair, how terribly unjust – she is the most important thing I would ever have, and important people should have feet that feel different.

A week after her death, I find a photo on her phone of her daughter holding her foot. Her daughter had texted the photo to herself.

On her last night, I sleep next to her. I do not know yet that it is the last night. By now she has lost her speech completely, so when I ask her how she is feeling she gives me a thumbs up with a smile as small as she is. The smile is there so that I do not beg to stay with her in the Sick Room, it is there to convince me that she has a few more months left in her. She touches my hand, half-folded in her half grip. She is less than half there by then, and as she holds it I think half half half half half half half, until she lets go.

When she dies, I think, “Finally.”

There is an enormous crimson bruise on her dead nose, and her daughter whispers into her dead ears, “Did I do it right, Ammi? Did I do the ghusl right? Did I?” I almost eat my own hands and imagine the crack of teeth, resisting, grinding against bone. I try to think of new ways to grieve but there are none. I am both 21 and 75. I am all teeth, so ugly. I tell myself I will one day be special and chosen, I will say something so important about the loss of someone who was so important.

The dreams begin immediately after her death, and I wake up and call them nightmares in my accounts of them to my friends. I dream she is dead and has been dead for days, but we do not bury her. Baba says the longer the dead are kept from their graves, the longer their souls remain in pain. I wonder if she is hurting as I sit on her bed, next to her body. Suddenly, she sits up and asks me if I have eaten, if I am okay. I do not remember her question exactly when I wake up, but I know it is about me. It is always about me. I dream I am looking for her in a pile of blankets and I cannot find her. I throw aside sheet after sheet, but she is so small I cannot find her. When I do, she bites my hand. She is all teeth, so beautiful. I dream she sits in a rickshaw. She is being taken away from me, and is about to be euthanized. Somehow, in the typical fashion of a dream, I know this and so does she. She looks at me with empty eyes and I hug her and kiss her hands. The kiss is full of too much spit. She tells me her grave will go cold if something terrible happens to me, or if I do something terrible to someone else. The rickshaw starts moving, and I watch her leave.

I move away and begin to live with a woman who shaves her arms every single day and always in my presence. It is either with a razor or a hair trimming machine, and I imagine hair floating in the air I breathe, inhaled and exhaled by me. I hate her immeasurably and do nothing about it. My life takes on the unmistakable quality of a life being lived in the after of immense grief. I am no longer the love of anyone’s life.

I go to work and do the work, and return home to the hairy air. I sit on the green table in the green kitchen to eat a meal that is of no nutritional value and will fill my stomach so that by 10pm I am not dizzy. I think of her whenever I am hungry. It leaves my body wanting in the same way. I come up with a game to play with myself everyday while I eat, whereby I try to come up with a title for a book or a poem I would one day write about her:
Fact: You Cannot Kill Someone By Not Checking Their Oxygen Levels
A Guide on How to Miss Someone Without it Killing You
How to Miss Someone Without Dying
How to Love a Dead Thing Without Dying
How to Love a Gone Thing and Live With Its Goneness
Spoiler Alert: Dying Person Dies.
Memories of the Forgettable Illness of an Unforgettable Person

At the end, I lick my bowl clean. I feel a hair at the back of my throat. I take a sip of water and choke on it embarrassingly loudly, and no one comes to make sure I am not dying. For a second I am so lonely that I almost smash the glass of water into my forehead.

Everyone worries about me.

Amma calls one day and convinces me to try daily affirmations, something she undoubtedly saw on the internet, and I resist the urge to ask her to shut down her Facebook account. But she is my mother, so I listen. She says affirmations help solve intense psychological problems, and they have helped her so much recently. She tells me to repeat the words “I can do it. I am worthy. I am okay.”

I stand in front of the mirror; it all feels terribly dramatic. I look myself in the eye. All I manage to say is, “I am no longer the love of anyone’s life.”

What I cannot say to my friends or my mother or her daughter is this: I am bored by her death. I am so, so bored. The pain has become one with my spine. It leaves me breathless as I stand in the middle of a road or peel an apple or collect change to pay for a meal, and I suddenly remember her in a way that makes my knees buckle. Yet, I am bored. The pain is boring, her death is boring, her illness is boring. It has happened before and it will happen again. Someone like me will wear the same pair of shoes every single day for two years, battered and worn down, just because the person they loved got it for them. Someone like me will steal their loved one’s comb and keep it in a Ziploc bag because it has their hair in it; they will steal their socks like I did, they will send themselves photos of their hands and feet like I did. They will forget exactly how it felt to wash their feet in a red tub at 3am in the morning. Someone will write a book on how to miss someone without dying. Someone will die, and someone will miss them. There is nothing remotely remarkable about any of it. People who feel holy to you should die in remarkable ways, should be grieved in remarkable ways. I am so bored. How boring of her to die in the way she did, how boring of me to be sad in the way I am: out of breath, sickly.

She is still the love of my life.