My father entered his death throws on the same night we all realized that Trump would be the 47th president of the United States. My mother called an ambulance as per standard procedure and we braced ourselves for the end. He resisted for five more days.
My mother has a photo of my dad holding the remote control in his hospital bed. He was still interested in knowing what’s going on. I wonder if he heard the news that we were all reconciling ourselves with; I didn’t ask.
There was something puzzlingly calming about holding our breath while the whole world mourned — my world, at least. I’d been trying to imagine what the final moments would feel like since his prognosis became a death sentence; I did not imagine that.
My dad had funny politics. He was both suspicious of and strangely drawn to strongmen. It was probably something they added to the baby formula in my village, this respect for zu3ama, idk.
Some days he’d denounce their authoritarianism; other days he’d praise their cunning and smarts. We’d joke about his slippery allegiances (“ma 3ando sa7eb”), but he’d insist that he was consistent. Sometimes I’d wonder if he was just shitposting IRL, saying the cringe thing with that twinkle in his eye.
We disagreed on things a lot, but I always knew he was proud of my principles; the ethos I’d kneaded together from every disparate ingredient in the ideological soup kitchens of Beirut and beyond. I think he saw some living legacy in my bluster.
My father resisted technocratic death for five days. In between doses of a multisyllabic cocktail of drugs, he would awake and thrash around, demanding to go back home.
My mother’s heart was breaking and everyone — doctors, neighbors, and me — reassured her that the standard procedure was for his own good. A few days into his death pangs, however, she decided to move him back to his bed, where he spent much of the past 6 months, where he would eventually pass on in a moment of peace and quiet.
We often joke about how we are, the men of my family. Stubborn. So, fucking stubborn. Stubborn and brave. This joke was not far from our lips during this time.
In the days since his passing, another joke has passed my mind, making me smile. It’s darkly funny that dad died on the same date as Ataturk’s death day. I wonder if dad’s getting a kick out of that.
My dad, the complicated figure, the strongman, the asshole known to demand better service in his travels with declarations of “I’m a very important man back home” and then laugh his ass off about the audacity of such a statement when talking all about it later; my dad, son of the Party, man of the mountain, child of his time. I’m missing him.
I found comfort in the idea of my father joining his parents in the afterlife; his father died when he was eight years old; his mother died six years ago. But now I’m reflecting on what it means for my patrilineage, this passing way.
I am a product of a nonobvious blend; the same ethno-sectarian categories, but ideologically opposed, with two very different temperaments. If the men of my father’s line are stubborn stone masons and strongmen, then the men of my mother’s are gentle poets, patient teachers, and holy mystics, and I’m a mangle of the two.
I’ve struggled a lot with the mismatch I’ve felt between how things are and how they ought to be; how I ought to be, how he ought to be, how we ought to have been together. I am not the man for the job I’d anticipated or tried to imagine for myself; I was not there making arrangements, I did not carry the coffin, I will not be there to shake hands with cousins and sip bitter coffee; these thoughts and that mismatch assailed my mind for months, and I still feel their sting.
But another feeling has been rising since the moment I heard that dad is gone. I can only be the man that I am; I don’t fill any shoes but mine. And that’s how I keep our legacy alive. That’s the only way.