At last, you are together again.
Rest well, dad. Your pain has ceased.
“IMAGINE A POSTCARD FROM BEIRUT”
a post card by @natasa_bergk,
scanned on a Konica Minolta 2100.
What do you imagine?
I see hospital beds.
I see the slow murder of hopes and dreams.
Imagine a postcard from Beirut.
A picture-perfect vista so chockablock with injustice that it’s a solid mass. Just a solid wall with no cartoon tunnel painted on. Just blank and impenetrable. We can’t see the vista anymore.
Tomorrow’s Veterans Day, an awkward day for an immigrant and an Arab too, ajallak. It never means anything to me beyond cognitive dissonance. Yet as I go through my father’s photos, I realize that he kinda counts as a veteran too; different uniform, no doubt, but the same war.
The war against hopelessness. The war against a life without meaning. The war against every power this world wields to break you. He fought to the very end. The doctors, the drug companies, the insurance people. The peddlers of death. He resisted them all and passed on to new life on his own terms.
My heart’s been breaking for months. This is not how the story should have ended. This pain and indignity; this is not how one’s last moments should be. I was long reconciled with my father’s death, but I was not ready to mourn a man — a human being — so cruelly extinguished.
But the news finally came this morning and the peace I was praying for his final hours fell upon me. A stillness of heart. Not because I’m done mourning, but because I instantly knew my father’s wish for me in that moment: take heart, be strong, show up, do your work.
Peace. Peace, dad. Put down your rifle. I don’t always believe in my own strength but in moments like these, I know you raised a soldier. We’ll take it from here.