“It’s cloudy outside,” I say. It’s a stupid thing to say.

“…” 

“…Yeah,” my uncle walks away. There’s nothing left to say. I’d rather stare out the window at the blank concrete hospital roof and dreary sky than go back to that awful room. The room where my grandfather’s corpse is lying on a hospital bed. 

Nobody warned me about the painful mundanity of death. 

Movies and books make death to be a dramatic end – a violent struggle, choked sobs or eyelids fluttering shut in the arms of a loved one. In reality, it is walking into Las Colinas Medical Center after U.S. History to a dimly lit hospital room and my motionless Nanajan (grandfather) surrounded by cloudy-eyed family. In reality, it is disgustingly plain.

**********

Cars, buildings and bluebonnets on State Highway 121 whir past my vision as I stare out the car window, slumped in the backseat. I tiredly scratch my arm as my Eid clothing nips at my skin. We are driving back from visiting family in Frisco, exhausted at evening’s approach after a long day of greeting relatives and eating. 

I can’t wait to change at home– ”We should stop to see your Nanajan,” my mom’s voice cuts through the silence. “Wish him Eid Mubarak.” I’ll just go tomorrow, I resolve. My grandfather has lived at my cousin’s house, just a two-and-a-half-minute bike ride away since fourth grade. I don’t know that won’t be the case in less than a week.

**********

“Assalam-alaikum, Nanajan,” I call out as I step inside, cold clinging to my hands from the winter air. I sit on the couch and wait.

clack 

…

clack 

His head appears through the hallway where his room is, the sound of his walker against the hardwood floor a little louder as he approaches. 

clack

He’s alive. Just… reduced. Slower. Smaller in the way people become when you don’t realize you’re watching them fade.

clack.

“Hamza…” A cough escapes his throat as he sits down, sputtering. His hands tremble more than the last time I saw him. And he regains his bearings. “…how are your studies?” I answer the way I always do. We sit in that same conversation we’ve had before.

He jokes with me, casually, that if I score in the top 10th percentile on the SAT, he’ll give me a hundred dollars.

I don’t know I’ll start thinking about it every time I open a score report, like he is still somewhere keeping count.

**********

I stare at the body laid bare on the table in front of me.

The washing makes it real in a way I don’t know how to hold – Ghusl. An Islamic cleansing of the body before burial by loved ones, symbolizing purity and respect. I’ve never seen it, and I don’t know what I was expecting. 

His hands. I cannot tear my eyes away from his hands. They’re still in a way I don’t recognize. No tremble, no uneven rhythm, no Parkinson’s disease in them anymore – no careful hesitation like when he used to lift a glass or reach for me in that stiff, searching way.

I stare too long, and look away too fast.

My uncle is the one doing the actual washing, while an imam instructs him verbally. The words elude me. I stare at my uncle, usually jubilant and laughable, but his face now feeds the hollow feeling inside me.

He is just as lifeless as the body in front of me.

**********

It is the day after Eid.

I forget.

**********

We all arrive at the funeral home the morning after his passing. Family goes inside to sit by the coffin, but I don’t sit there first.

I end up at the laundromat the next door over, where the machines and usual humdrum go on like nothing has changed. The room smells like warm air and detergent. No one is at the front desk, just an eerily flickering sign sputtering “OPEN.”

My attention drifts to cages in the corner of the shop. A couple of parakeets waddle about, colors contrasting against the harsh orange of the walls as if they somehow wandered there without question. 

I take a photo without thinking. I don’t know why.

Inside the funeral home, people are crying.

Outside, everything is still moving. 

**********

“When are you leaving for your school trip?” My friend asks over FaceTime. I am leaving for a journalism convention – the Interscholastic League Press Conference – on the 10th. I’ve already been before, but I’m heading out again for my senior year.

I check the date – April 4. “Six days!”

I check the date – April 4, 2026. 

“Sorry, I need to go.” And I hang up.

April 4. And I cry.

The same April 4 I came home from school to a silent car ride and an even more silent hospital room. The same weekend my grandfather’s lifeless body laid bare on a table in front of me. The same weekend I carried his coffin into a pit at a cemetery with my brothers and sisters. The same weekend I watched my grief-wracked mother cry harder than I had ever seen. 

The same April 4 imbued on his glossy, now year-old gravestone.

**********

Eid Mubarak, Nanajan. 

**********

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