“If you don’t know my father, how can you know the people in the streets of Tehran?”
—James Baldwin

We circle the bed in the ICU as if gathering around the dinner table, all of us partaking in the last days of our father. He stares at the ceiling. His nose is hooked to an oxygen tube, his mouth open like a fish out of water before us.

My brother is reading Dua Kumayl, which pleases my father, who has been reciting the prayer of repentance every Friday. “Have mercy on one whose wealth is hope and whose weapon is tears . . .” My father doesn’t speak Arabic, except in prayer, but that doesn’t stop him from correcting the pronunciation of my brother, a professor of Islamic studies. The monitors blink, measuring the calculus of his body—the rate of change, the sequences, functions, and the delta approach to limits—formulas I don’t understand but want to trust.

I don’t know how we get from keep-alive and life-support to letting-go. I arrive later than my brothers and sister, and still imagine he might get better. So I hold everyone back, my tongue a one-way bridge rising out of my mouth. There is something about the protocols that make the doctors speak in indirection. We are all working under the rules of life’s censorship.

Why do we argue when we gather to share the passing of a parent? We are not worried about inheritance, which is often a problem, as it was with my mother’s family. But we still drown in misunderstanding. Is it because we all have our own ways to grieve? Some of us want to talk about everything. Others want to mourn in silence. Is it because we want to do what he wants? Do we agree with what he wants? I feel close to my father, but he hasn’t been my role model. I often disagreed with his actions and beliefs, forming relationships that were deliberately in contrast to his. How can we grieve and make rapid decisions at the same time? Maybe it’s because we can’t think of him not being here.

I never wanted a child and never thought I’d have to make a life-or-death decision. But here we are, considering our father’s death. I am the eldest yet I look to my sister, who is a physician, for answers. She is also grieving and has no solution. Sylvia Plath called dying “an art, like everything else.” No one teaches it.

In an interview, the film director Asghar Farhadi explained that Iranians prefer to keep their dying loved ones in the dark. We don’t call it lying. It is an endeavor to shelter the patients. The doctors don’t explain the illness to them. The family sows the final nights with hope and leaves the mourning for later. But do the dying really not know? My father is a doctor, and he puts his trust in the doctors. Yet they look to us for answers as they enter and leave the room. What would he do? What would he prescribe for himself?

All night the oxygen tank blathers on, the room awash in fluorescent light. In the morning, two doctors, one blond and one with a kippah, come to his bedside. They ask how he is feeling and wonder whether he can make decisions and understand his condition. Gods hover above us. My father sees two angels, Munkar and Nakir (the Denied and the Denier), with their black eyes and their burning tongues. They are here to test his faith: “Who is your Lord? Who is your prophet? What is your religion?” He is tense and terrified: “I believe in God and Muhammad. I’m a good Muslim. Why are you asking me these things?” Looking back at us, he pleads, “What do they want from me?” In Islam, on Judgment Day, your tongue, hands, feet, and skin can testify against you and confess to what you have done.

Who is doing the translating for him? Translation comes from the Latin, meaning “carry across.” Translators decide what gets brought over and how. In Christianity, translation also refers to the removal of a saint’s body to a new place. Tarjoma, “translation” in Arabic and Persian, was once tied to interpretation and commentary. It also meant a biography, the narrative manufactured from our lives. Tarjoma in Persian is the subject, verb, and object. Paradise, which comes from the Iranian Avestan, is just an enclosed garden.

Father worked so long in hospitals, they are like another home; if he can’t be a good doctor, why not a good patient? He used to quote Saadi, “If you come to my bedside as a doctor / I will forsake both worlds for the joy of illness.” His doctors are amazed at how the previous year he had overcome their calls for dialysis and enteral feeding.He had changed his daily routine and meals in such a way that he was able to avoid their prognoses.

I remember him coming back with a bruised face from a dentist who was measuring his mouth and jaw for dentures. I was shocked and angry. But he defended the doctor, insisting the work had to be done right.

In Persian, the word for patient is bi-mar (“without snake”). It is said that the snake (mar) was a sign of health and healing for the ancient, pre-Zoroastrian Persians. In Greek mythology, Asclepius, the god of medicine, holds a snake wrapped around a staff, a symbol also used by the World Health Organization. Even though the snake is a symbol of evil in Christianity and recalls Satan tempting Eve in Paradise, caduceus—the staff with two snakes wrapped around it, carried by Hermes, the messenger of the gods—is the official insignia of the United States Medical Corps and the Public Health Service. It represents peace.

Doctors were once apostles, church fathers, and in the Middle East hakims, which meant they were also philosophers, scientists, and sages. The Persian word pezeshk, for the one who removes dard (“pain”), dates back to before Islam. I wish I could also feel comfort in the sweet smell of iodoform, which is not of cleanness but of cleansing. I never wanted to be a doctor, even though that was always my father’s expectation—his first disappointment in me. I want the body to remain a mystery I don’t need to open and read.

It is late. I wet his lips with a sponge as he confesses, “You know I haven’t eaten for days.” I say I know. We haven’t been able to attach a feeding tube. It is hard to watch him and say no, but whatever he eats will settle in his lungs and they are already filled with so much liquid that he is sinking. So we wait, as the night waits patiently outside.

When I return the next day, he is flustered—caught in a web of tubes and wires, twisting and turning. He can’t explain his needs to the nurses, and asks me why the monitor on the wall, which helps him to read what is happening to his body, has been turned off. His body won’t pay attention anymore, yet he still wants to control it. I rush around the ward imploring, as they reposition his bed toward a second monitor. Iterating the numbers on the screen as if they are a zikr after prayer, he slowly calms down.

When my brother enters, he takes me aside, whispering, “Do you know what you have done?” I assume it has something to do with the second monitor or my confrontation with the nurses. “He is now turned to the Qibla,” he explains, facing the Kaaba. “You have prepared him, prepared him to go home.”

Muslims once faced Jerusalem to pray, like the Jews. The direction changed to the Kaaba through a revelation: “turn your face toward the Sacred Mosque.” Kaaba, meaning cube, was a holy site before Islam. Muslims believe it was first built by Abraham and his son Ishmael. The sacred black stone that marks the eastern corner was also part of the building before Islam. Some believe it comes from heaven and dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. Scientists have come up with different formulas to find the Kaaba from anywhere you are, for example: Tan(Q) = [sin(λ_K – λ) * cos(φ_K)] / [cos(λ_K – λ) * sin(φ) – sin(λ_K – λ) * cos(φ) * sin(φ_K).

Death brings us together like a Thanksgiving party, the setting of many American dramas. I recall the accusations at the funeral dinner in August: Osage County: “But if you think for a solitary second you can fathom the pain that man endured in his natural life, you got another think coming,” the Weston matriarch says. “You never had real problems so you got to make all your problems yourselves.” 

When everything is quiet, I notice my friend has sent some flowers. I show the bouquet to my father, who smiles and asks who sent it. I blurt out the name of a friend he has never met. He sighs, “So it is for you.”

What is a heart but a fist opening and closing. We feel most alone trying to hang on to each other—each of us clutching at our own grief. Each of us in the service of our expectations. And this is just one iteration of “life / the only shelter” (Paul Celan).

Out of nowhere, our father quotes a couplet from a ghazal by Mohammad-Taqi Bahar—with a refrain degar hech (“nothing more”)—that we haven’t heard before: “Happy my father’s spirit who told the professor / teach my children love and nothing more.” It isn’t about accomplishment—what I believe matters most to my father.

Iranians often resort to poetry as a way of expressing what they feel or believe. Poetry is the most succinct way to make a point. Bahar, the last poet laureate of Iran, spent two of his final years (1947–49) in a sanatorium in Switzerland for consumption. He managed to return and die in Tehran. The first couplet of the ghazal reads, “We’re candles, kindled hearts and nothing more / Sorrow from night till dawn and nothing more.” Bahar means “spring” in Persian.

I had always imagined that when it came to this point there would be much I would want to share with him. Now I want to lie beside him, tell him about when he left for the hajj pilgrimage without telling me and I, still a boy, tried to track his scent from his pajamas, the sleeves and pant legs splayed out on the bed. But all I can do is hold his bony hand, his knuckles turning into prayer beads. I try to synch and rhyme with his breath, both of us oared by the ventilator. As long as I can breathe with him, as long as I can breathe . . .

Late in the morning, while we are standing vigil, he asks me to help him clear his stool. The nurses have done that earlier, but he is still in pain and can’t relieve himself. Pain, Elaine Scarry writes, is inexpressible and most radically private. I rush out to get a nurse, even though he asked me to do it myself. I’ve never touched my father’s body in such an intimate way, and I am afraid. I remember my despair looking up to him when I was nine as he gently held and dressed my bloody finger, my nail hanging like a broken thorn. How do you refuse your father’s last request?

The doctors are back to explain what will happen, asking him whether he is okay with the decision to start hospice. If he eats or drinks it will only make things worse. Before, he didn’t dare. He wanted to get better. But now, after they leave, he turns to us and says, “I don’t know what exactly they were saying, but I could see it in their eyes. They think this is really the end.” He hesitates—“no?” I am looking at his empty right eye socket, a mihrab. Silence answers for us. Silence that is both a noun and a verb.

For his last supper, we run out to get his favorite food. He is happy, all five of his children are together around him, and we bear witness by posting a picture of us, without him, on his Facebook page, as if it were just a holiday gathering. Looking at our picture, his chapped lips repeat, “This is all I wanted.” He carefully takes bite after bite of his ice cream, which he never finishes. That night, holding to the hem of the passing evening, he prepares us for a talk I know he has been waiting to deliver for years.

I was raised on cinema. I think this is just like the movies, except it is happening to us. What do the living know of dying? We know of dying what leaves may know of leaving. We know only the verb, and we know dying is part of who we are.

It is time. We crowd like fallen fruits around the feet of the one the nurses call the patriarch of our family. He tries to speak through the oxygen mask but it’s hard. He collects his strength and tries again without the mask. After a few sentences, we have to put the mask back on. The monitor says his numbers are falling. We try again, but it’s no use. He has a hard time speaking and breathing—“and there was so much more I wanted to say,” he reminds us. His words are usurpedby the silence where all the losses return—every breath carrying a naked, unborn word. Along the sanitized hospital hallway, the doors continue to open and close their mouths, devouring the families.

They say Goethe’s last words were “more light!” The last words of Taliesin Namkai-Meche, who was killed by Jeremy Christian while trying to stop a fellow passenger’s anti-Muslim tirade against two women, were “Tell everyone on this train I love them.” Judith Butler writes, “One mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever.”

Outside, the rain washes the sidewalk. In a puddle of water, an American Spirit butt is a floating yellow skiff. “All rain is good for the soul,” Edmond Jabès writes, “but bad for eternity, which has left life and death behind.”

There is so much I don’t notice: plants turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, lungs picking it from the air, red blood cells carrying it to the distant parts of my body, the earth’s rotation leaning always toward the East, radio waves ferrying our messages through waiting rooms, the drift of light outside the ward, an electric current rushing up to the monitor. We assume a tomorrow, a home we can return to, our parents there to answer our questions. Until one day.

My father’s organs—kidneys, lungs, liver—are now in revolt. He is in such pain that we begin giving him morphine and slowly unleash him from the machines. Dard, “pain” in Persian, is from the family of darman (“remedy”) and daru (“drug”). Some say the word drug comes from daru. But dard is also different from pain. Pain is rooted in punishment and retribution.

He is turning into a ghost, a spirit. I continue to breathe with him, until there is a time when I can no longer hold my breath long enough for him to start breathing again. My hands are cold and clammy, and I must let go to breathe. Ghost, gast in Old English, means “breath.”

We never made it to the special hospice room that was prepared for us. The Uniform Determination of Death Act defines a person dead when there is “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions.” The second law of thermodynamics says that if there is no intervention, everything degrades, the body moving from hot to cold. It is like a translation where what is carried over is always something less.

We know death only through someone else dying. It is always the Other. We try to catch a glimpse of it, gazing as so many slip away, sedated, casting a shadow, waiting to catch the good night. Heidegger argued that we are all “beings-toward-death.”

One of my best teachers, philosophy professor Carol White, was quadriplegic. She comforted me by saying that Heidegger is not just talking about a personal existential death but of a cultural one—our shared and disclosed experience of the world. It isn’t “I” but “us.” She quoted, “Death is not the end of the possible but the highest keeping (the gathering sheltering) of the mystery of calling disclosure.” The renowned Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus wrote, “Carol White chose to spend twenty years laboriously writing a masterful meditation on finitude and death.” Her book, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, was finally published posthumously.

My father had always planned to be buried next to his mother in Iran. But he is staying with us in America. Revolution, war, and family have their own stories to finish. On a hill facing the ocean, his body rests alone in a home he could only dream of. His children, a constellation across the States. The sky, a purdah at the horizon, his parents left on the other side.

Father hoped for an Islamic funeral and even bought his own kafan decorated with prayers of mercy. A wake for him was a verb. To fulfill his wish, we search the Internet to learn about the process and the Mayat prayer. The undertaker tries to show us the different types of coffins. I can imagine him solemnly sleeping in a bronze casket, with his hands crossed on his chest, as though flying into himself, like Bill Knott said. But in Islam your body is not supposed to be preserved and protected. You come naked and must return naked. Your body should advance the laws of thermodynamics and decay as soon as possible.

In the afternoon, my brother calls a mosque, asking for someone who can perform the proper rituals. After we make the arrangements, they send an imam. But he refuses, saying it is blasphemy to be buried wrapped in holy words. He is Sunni and wants to save our Shia father, educating us on the importance of a plain sheet. I’m jealous of their relationship with God. My father used to tell me that the Qur’an says, “He is nearer to you than your jugular vein.” But even now my father needs to defend his faith. And we are not trying to please God, only our father. So, like immigrants looking for a sympathetic home, we look for another imam. During the Mayat prayer, we all recite: “Oh, Allah! Forgive all believing men and women, dead or alive. Bring us and them together in goodness.”

For the funeral, I ask my former common-law spouse to join us. We had separated when she came out as a lesbian, but she remains a best friend and is the first person to contribute to a pediatric intern award my siblings established in the name of my father. My sister reminds me that this is not what my father would have wanted. He never knew why we separated but always believed that she had led me astray. I had quit school, with nothing to show for it but an unfinished degree in philosophy. I was far away from family then, working at a health food store in Santa Cruz, helping my partner raise her child. I didn’t want to be Iranian or American. The language of the time was hostages and war, but my alphabet was love and existentialism.

Who is the funeral for? I know it is my decision to ask my former partner to join us. I want to believe that after death, things will be different, that he will be more accepting, that he can now see through us, that nothing needs to be explained anymore. But an argument ensues among the siblings, and I feel self-righteous. Death, which brings everyone together, can also suffocate the family. Grief can appear in many guises. Its bitter aftertaste lingers in our mouths for years. Am I just rebelling again? Trying to rewrite my past and my father?

For many cultures, the proper burial is tied to legacy and inheritance. The placement of graves in familial plots strengthens the connection. It is often the first son who is responsible, a role that I never fulfilled.

For Greeks, proper rites were necessary to keep souls from restlessly wandering in Limbo. In ancient Rome, the final kiss captured the parting spirit as it tried to escape through the mouth with the last breath. My father also spoke of the spirit leaving the body. Spirit from the Latin spiritus, as in breathing.

I have never seen a person die and am afraid of what it will be like. Yet, as I watch, I notice that what is left after his heart stops—his stiff and porcelain body, the light blue pupil of his eye, the fallen jaw and unlatched teeth—is no longer my father, just the present he left behind for us to wrap.

We will bathe it three times and dry it. I will help fold, wrap, and tie it in the three sheets he bought for it. We will place it in a cardboard box, to be opened easily, and walk it into the ground as an offering. I will turn the head to the right side and lay a handful of dirt on the white sheet, so worms can find it more easily, and I will walk back and forth beside it, so the spirit is comforted. I will recite to it, tapping on his black stone, so he knows we are still here. I will pour water on the stone, hoping something can grow. ■

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