The eye has very little to do at the electric crematorium. There are no flames to look into, none of the old images of wood, river, smoke and ash that a person is given early and assumes will be waiting when the time comes. Fire has been turned into procedure. A vaulted chamber, several steel slots, a man in sandals whose competence has long outlived any need to look solemn. He has done this thousands of times and shows it. The families haven’t.
My aunt went through one of those slotted doors a few days ago, and I stood in the second row. Around me people were breaking, my mother among them, her face doing something I had never seen it do before. There are expressions one knows only in theory until they appear on someone one loves, and then they seem to alter the whole face, including the face from yesterday. I watched hers and waited for the corresponding thing to happen in me. It didn’t, or it happened so faintly it couldn’t identify itself.
There was discomfort, certainly, though discomfort has many sources in a crematorium: the heat, the waiting, other people’s grief, the plain animal knowledge of what was happening behind the steel, the shame of searching for sorrow while sorrow stood everywhere around me, visible and fluent. I kept expecting the feeling to step forward and give its name, and nothing did. The door closed, and we went home and ate, because you eat.
The days since have had the feel of muslin. Morning comes through, and so do meals, sleep, messages, errands, the occasional joke, all the small things that establish that a day is taking place. Yet the hours don’t quite gather. A shape appears behind them, then loses its edge when approached. Calling this grief feels premature. Calling it absence feels false. It’s possible to spend several days inside a feeling and still be unable to say whether the feeling is there.
There comes an age when immediate elders begin dying at regular intervals. Death, then the aftermath of death, then the next death. Each name is singular and each call still breaks the surface of the day, but the living begin to recognise the procedure: the journey, the gathering, relatives last seen at another funeral, the food that appears because bodies go on making their small demands even beside a body that has stopped. This knowledge doesn’t feel like wisdom. Most of it is administrative. One learns where to stand and when to leave, how long to stay silent, which task can be handed to someone who can’t cry. The body is particular. The room has done this before.
The punishing strangeness lives somewhere in that division. Death keeps its claim to be an event without precedent while its arrangements turn familiar, and the aftermath of one death has barely begun to disclose itself before another enters and disturbs it. The dead don’t stay in their proper years either. They turn up together in the living, without regard for chronology.
When memory reaches for my aunt, it returns with a house. A reasonably modest place outside Madurai, near the Vaigai, with mango and coconut trees in the front yard and jasmine coming over the wall. I stayed there for long stretches as a boy. The rooms remain available in the dark. The idlis were very good. She drove a hard bargain at every shop, parsimonious to the edge of comedy. She was not sophisticated in the way my mother is sophisticated. The sentence makes me uneasy, though unease does not make it false. It contains the judgment of someone who kept a certain distance and then came to mistake the distance for knowledge.
The house is more complete in memory than the woman who lived in it. This feels indecent to admit, though no memory has ever promised any justice. It keeps a corridor and loses a face. It preserves the taste of breakfast and mislays the person who served it. A whole childhood can stay attached to a place while the adults who made the place possible recede into function, one aunt, one uncle, the person who knew where the mosquito swats were kept.
Other people at the crematorium knew another woman. My mother had a sister before she had children. Their relationship began in a world where none of us existed, in rooms and quarrels and private jokes that didn’t need us as witnesses. The grief on my mother’s face came from that earlier country. For a few minutes she seemed younger and older at once, though even that may be a meaning I supplied after the fact. What I saw was simpler. She became unfamiliar. The person crying was my mother, but she was also a sister, standing inside a history I couldn’t enter, and her grief didn’t ask mine to resemble it. I asked that of myself.
Standing near people in full grief makes a faint feeling look like a failure of love. One begins to inspect it. Is this sorrow, delayed sorrow, fear for the living, embarrassment, fatigue? The questions multiply and the feeling grows less available. Watching a thing can change it, and the thing I was watching went quiet under the attention. We talk as though the inside of the chest were the one place a person can’t be wrong, the witness who never lies. I know what I feel. The sentence is almost a birthright. In the crematorium I couldn’t say it with any confidence at all, and what was left was a man trying to take evidence from himself while arranging his face for the room.
The face arranged itself before the feeling did. I don’t think this was deceit. A funeral asks the body to take part even when the mind has no clean account: stand here, do this, do that, follow the others, eat. The ritual makes a smaller and more reliable promise than feeling does. It knows what comes next.
In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead, that the self can’t be killed, that bodies pass and forms change and duty remains. Yet the teaching begins with a man who has seen his elders and teachers and kin arrayed before him and can’t act. His bow slips from his hand, his body fails, and before the philosophy can speak, grief has already made a ruin of instruction. That old argument was somewhere in the room, whether anyone said it aloud or not. The body going through the door was a body, and also, by the tradition that built the room, something that had never been only a body. I couldn’t tell whom this consoled. The steel door closed with a thump.
The first cremation I remember is one I didn’t attend. I was twelve, perhaps thirteen, when my grandfather died. There was school. I said I had school and think that was even true, though truth is generous to a child who wants an excuse. I didn’t want to go. No adult took me by the arm, no one said he was your blood, you will come. They let the refusal pass, and I went to school while a man I was related to entered a fire somewhere else. Thirty years have gone by since, and grief still hasn’t arrived.
I know I didn’t like him. Whether I didn’t love him is harder to prove. The long silence may be evidence, perhaps enough for any ordinary purpose, but grief has already shown itself to be an unreliable witness, and it seems convenient to call it to the stand only because its verdict suits the memory. Whatever was between us didn’t survive as sorrow. That is as far as the evidence goes.
My father had withdrawn from his own father while both were alive. He wasn’t cruel. He had simply stopped expecting anything. A son can leave a father without moving house, by asking fewer questions, by keeping kindness and removing hope, until the relationship continues mostly as a habit. I watched that withdrawal without understanding it. Perhaps my indifference was learned. Perhaps it was earned. The family offered no way to tell the two apart. At my aunt’s funeral the same flatness came back, different in feeling and identical in appearance. A quiet chest carries no label saying whether the quiet is indifference, delay, shock, or only quiet.
We expect grief to keep some proportion. We expect it to follow from the years, the shared rooms, the love given and the love returned, to arrive when the people who were near us go and to stay away when strangers do. Then there is Anthony Bourdain, who shouldn’t be in this moment at all and is. His death didn’t reach me on the day it was reported. I can’t remember where I was or who told me. It arrived as news, flat and finished, and only later took on weight, and the weight has stayed for years. We never met. He didn’t know I existed. He had filled a possible life for me, one made of movement and food and strangers and talk and good sentences, and the hope that restlessness might become a way of living rather than a wound, and he had seemed to find the most enviable version of that life before dying inside it.
There was no shared future to lose, no conversation, no claim on his time or memory. Still, something in his death continued to trouble the life I imagined for myself. Perhaps it exposed the foolish hope that appetite and motion could protect a person from whatever travelled with him. Perhaps the sorrow belonged partly to the self that had taken his life as evidence that one could keep going by going elsewhere. Explanations have accumulated. The feeling has not become less strange.
I have felt Bourdain’s death more sharply than the deaths of some relatives, and this unsettles every easy proportion between kinship and grief. Its persistence has never depended on my being able to justify it. A life can matter from a distance, enter the future one imagines, and quietly give shape to decisions it will never know about. When such a life ends, there may be no shared past to mourn, yet something in the future can still narrow. I do not know whether the sorrow is for the dead man, the possible life, or the part of oneself that had used him as proof. The distinction has never held for long.
There is one death about which none of this doubt has ever had any purchase. V died young and suddenly, with an argument between us left unfinished. She loved the back of a motorcycle, the going more than the arriving, and she loved puri subzi with the ease of someone who had loved it before taste became a matter of identity. Her death arrived at full size and stayed. Ten years of spirals and wreckage aren’t an interpretation. They were lived, in the body, in decisions, in ruined days, in the long habit of returning to an absence as though returning might change it. There was no uncertainty about whether grief had happened, and the certainty didn’t make it simple. Love was in it, with anger and guilt and vanity and loyalty and the refusal to let an unfinished argument be finished by a death. Knowing that I grieved didn’t teach me what grief was. It taught me only that grief can grow so large the witness and the evidence become the same ruined thing.
What helped came slowly and without ceremony. I went, the way she had liked to go: years of walking, of trains and bad roads and rooms in towns I’ve since forgotten, of sitting still on purpose, of trying to want less and carry the thing more lightly. None of it announced itself as repair. Looking back I can watch the grief loosen across those years, though at no single point could I have told you it was loosening. Once or twice I believed I had arrived somewhere and could stay. That was the error, and it’s an ordinary one. I mistook reaching a calm for being allowed to keep it.
C.S. Lewis kept a notebook after his wife died and found that grief was not a state he could pass through and be done with, but a valley that kept turning him back to the same ground under a slightly altered light. He noticed something worse on the way round. The harder he tried to summon the real woman, the more he met a figure of his own making, the dead drifting by small degrees into something assembled out of his own need. That is the danger the house near the Vaigai already knows. The rooms stay sharp and the woman thins. A calm reached beside the river, or anywhere, can be lost without ever having been false, and grief returning doesn’t prove the earlier peace a lie. It proves only that the loss was never the kind of thing that holds still.
What none of this explains is why my aunt’s death brought the old grief back. The aftermath of a death is the stretch in which it finds out what else it can touch, and this one reached past its own name. The two don’t belong together in any obvious way. One was the great wound, one is barely visible, and yet in the days after the crematorium the older grief was suddenly present, more present than the woman that had just gone. It would be easy to say that one death opens a door for the next, but the ease of the sentence makes me distrust it. The truth was less graceful. The old ache surfaced with no announcement and no clear object, then receded so completely that I wondered whether I had put it there myself.
This is where trust becomes difficult. When sorrow rises after an aunt’s death, does it belong to the aunt? To V? To the sight of my mother losing a sister? To the sudden visibility of my mother’s own death, still only possible and so unbearable in a different register? To the boy in the house near the Vaigai, who assumed those rooms and those women would wait for him somewhere beyond his attention? The questions arrive far more clearly than the feeling.
My mother’s face has stayed with me more clearly than my aunt’s. When it returns it brings tenderness and alarm, though I can’t tell how much of either is grief. It brings something else almost indecent to write down: the death of an elder makes the elders who remain more visible as people who can die. A sister goes through a steel door and for a second the sister standing outside it is imaginable on the other side. The dead take versions of the living away with them. My aunt remembered a boy who can’t now ask her what she remembered, held incidents I’ve forgotten, judgments I might dislike, an affection I may never have noticed. The loss of that witness ought to mean something. Whether it’s what I feel now, I can’t say.
There is a temptation to call this uncertainty honesty and make a virtue of it, and that would only be another arrangement of the face. None of these thoughts was in the crematorium as a thought. They came later, when the mind began arranging what the body had failed to announce. Krishna, Lewis, the older deaths, the remembered house. Arrangement is what writing does. The day itself was less cooperative.
There was warmth between us, and shallow warmth is still warmth. There were breakfasts and summers and the ease with which a child takes food and shelter without once considering the person who made them possible. There was a woman who had performed a life so completely that I can’t say where her duty ended and her wanting began, and perhaps she couldn’t have said either. It’s tempting to call her death the sealing of a room I might one day have entered, but the sentence flatters the neglect. The door stood open for years and I stayed outside, and I might have gone on standing outside for good. Death closes possibilities, though some of them were only stories told afterward, futures invented once they can no longer be tested. The closing is real even when the wish behind it was weak. I don’t know what to call the feeling that leaves.
That night I went down to the sea for an old reason. Large landscapes have sometimes made private pain easier to hold by refusing to notice it, and the mountains had done that many times. The sea has a different scale, lower and more repetitive, though indifference is indifference whether it rises into peaks or lies flat to the horizon. The moon laid a road across the water. It led nowhere, though the distance made it look exact. The trees on the shore were black shapes, and the nearest things had no detail at all.
No revelation came, which was a relief after all the meanings I had already tried to lay on the day. The water kept breaking the light and giving it back. My aunt stayed in the house near the Vaigai, and the house stayed clearer than she was. I could find its rooms in the dark. I could remember the jasmine leaning over the wall.
The jasmine belonged to the neighbour.
It crossed anyway.