By Saleh al Shaibany — Last week, I was determined to cancel an engagement or two, so I could spend a few quiet minutes with my father at his graveside. Was I feeling guilty for not doing so earlier? It must have been because I convinced myself that I was squeezing the visit between two very tight schedules. If that was so, I asked myself, as I was speeding towards the graveyard, whether I was very hypocritical about the whole thing.
I remembered a colleague, perhaps out of years of living in Europe, questioning the idea of visiting dead relatives.
“What was the point?” he asked me. “They wouldn’t hear you or know you were there.”
His argument was that we visit the graves of the departed to try to make up for all the lost time that we should have spent with them when they were alive. Maybe so, but the dead never come back and tell us that there is no contact with the living.
It would be terrible to die and find out nobody ever remembers you in their prayers. Besides, if we bother calling friends or visit them, then five quiet minutes at the cemetery is never wrong.
I am not sure why I stopped at the gates of the graveyard. It was not fear. Perhaps it was out of respect or the realisation that I was entering the gates that led to the parallel world. This is it, I thought. The city of the dead, and it all ends here.
It was eerily quiet. My heart missed a beat when I saw an old man with a flowing white beard standing a distance away from me.
He was ghostly, ancient and was looking straight at me. It would have been fitting if he melted away into thin air. But he didn’t. He just kept looking at me as I said ‘Salaam’. He mumbled back the greeting.
My mind drifted when I reached my father’s grave. Was the old man there to prepare himself for the eventuality? It was a kind of rehearsal for the last journey. Was that one of the reasons I was there?
We don’t know how the curtain will fall when the call comes. One thing is for sure I thought, as I was kneeling at the graveside, we would not be given the choice of the fabric or the colour of the curtain.
I touched some gravel on top of the grave, removed a few weeds and shifted sands with my fingers. It was an emotional action rather than compulsive.
It was part of a futile attempt to make contact. Since we don’t know what exactly goes on behind the curtain, we create a make-believe world in our desperate effort to keep the memory alive.
What is lost is gone forever, but it does not mean we should forget. The old man was still there when I was leaving. He completely ignored me when I passed him on my way out. He sat next to a grave as if in deep contemplation, looking down at the sands.
The usual noises of the city greeted me when I left the narrow road to enter the highway. I felt good and also relieved, as if a mental burden had been removed. The visit is always therapeutic and it eases stress.
In conclusion, it does not matter whether the dead are aware of us when we visit their permanent abode or not. Let’s think of it as a way to let out steam when the going gets tough.
— saleh_shaibany@yahoo.com
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