Someone once told me that in Islam, the end is green and so is the beginning. My grandfather Ali was a staunch and occasionally aggressive atheist, but when he died of a major mycordial infarction on a golf course in northern Sydney in 2004, absolutely everything was green; bright, verdant and everlasting.
He wasn’t meant to die like he did. If it had been up to a Mullah - an Islamic cleric that kept hassling my great grandmother, he would have been swept off to a religious school in Mashhad and been shaped, pretty quickly, into a Mullah as well, black gowned and gold toothed, who would’ve had his heart give out at 66 in an industrial city in northeastern Iran without me ever knowing his name. Instead, he died like a rich white man, playing golf in cream shorts that had been freshly ironed that morning by my grandmother, with a wintery tropical sun shining down on the backs of his upturned knees.
I’ve always reckoned that he would’ve been a bit gleeful, as he sped away over the cropped grass towards the other side. I have often imagined him squealing; wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee for a very long time, a buzzing flying ball shooting over the undulations of the land, a jubilant blob getting carried away by a southerly blowing in merrily from Antarctica. Off to see the narwhals and the melting ice caps! One big adventure at last. And absolutely no more tedious parties or extravagant displays of grief.
My eight-year-old self became religious about avoiding cracks in pavement, knocking on wood, chanting in bathroom mirrors in the dark.
At this point for him, there had been more than enough.
So far, death and dying have only been cursory visitors in my life. The threat of them has loomed close, just softly touching my outer membrane with one finger, stained a brilliant Brett Whitely blue.
For this, I’ve always known I was lucky.
As a child, before I could fall asleep, I would lie rigidly in bed and fastidiously compliment God with every compliment I knew in both English and Farsi so as to ensure that everyone I loved stayed a) alive forever and b) safe from spontaneously dying on a golf course. I didn’t want anyone to die ever again. My eight-year-old self became religious about avoiding cracks in pavement, knocking on wood, chanting in bathroom mirrors in the dark. Nobody seemed to notice. This was probably for the best.
My mother’s family left Iran explosively in the early 80s on an adrenaline fuelled jet plane speeding out from Tehran to Heathrow. My grandfather was going to be shot by the Revolutionary Guard that week, if they’d missed it. My father’s family, milky skinned middle class Protestants, left England softly, in a bought of careful academic thought on a 6-week boat trip. The babies played on the deck, their cornflower hair gleaming beneath the Pacific wind.
Before my mother and grandparents arrived in Australia, they lived unhappily in seven countries, with none of them being the one they actually wanted to be in. Iran quickly became an ephemeral memory, which then became an unquestioned fact, with my siblings and I growing up in a phantom space built on the breathy illusions of a culture and time that had long since passed.
The writer’s grandmother Fozieh, grandfather Ali and mother Atousa, taken in the 1960s. Source: Supplied
The pain of losing Iran in the way they did was a kind of arterial thing, gushing out of them in a long relentless way regardless of whether they wanted it to or not. The loss of their homeland, like it is for most refugees, morphed into something akin to bone marrow. It became too deep to touch and too deep to question, a kind of dissonance that can only be inherited genetically, passed on through a place too ancient for any of us to ever truly understand.
In something as old as Iranian culture, loss is no stranger. Neither is grief. After my grandfather died, my grandmother wore black for two months straight. She didn’t dance for four years. As is the custom, a river of black clad mourners came through our house for weeks, bringing sweets and wailing downstairs softly. When I showed my friends photos of my eighth birthday party, they asked me; “What’s going on with your Grandma’s face?”. She wept in every photo from that year, her face distorted and blurred beneath the yellow kitchen lights.
Now, eighteen years later, my family continues to go to the cemetery on his ‘Sol’ - his death day, where everyone stands together and holds my grandmother, who buckles beneath her sunglasses. We look at the empty tombs beside him that are quietly waiting to be filled by the rest of my family when that Brett Whitley finger comes ‘a knockin’. A family crypt, in Italian red marble. It is weird sometimes to stand there and know that one day I will come here and see them all buried together in a classy mass grave, a sweet and complicit row.
I realised then in a bout of teenage angst that loss was always going to be around for us. Even in something as innocent as lunchtime. I hated it.
When I was a teenager on Sydney’s northern beaches, all my friends would go to the beach together every Sunday and eat hot chips. My siblings and I would go to a Iranian restaurant in Lane Cove where we would guzzle approximately 7 million sugar cubes and kick each other beneath the stiff tablecloths. Sometimes, there would be someone reciting a poem that neither me or my siblings or dad could understand. I remember looking over at my mother once and seeing that her eyes were closed, one tear running down her cheek. She couldn’t translate it, when I hassled her. All she could manage was that it was about a single wavering beam of light, about to go out. I realised then in a bout of teenage angst that loss was always going to be around for us. Even in something as innocent as lunchtime. I hated it.
When I went to Iran for the first time as an effusive 22-year-old with vague dreams of ‘finding myself’, somebody told me that at funerals, women would collect their tears in glass vials that they would wear around their necks, a tiny magical artefact of pain. People would wail hysterically in public mourning parades and rip their clothes in agony. Some widows would wear black for the rest of their lives. Death, in Iran, had a structure to it. As did grief. There were explicit lines to loss, and a gravity given to the sinewy pain attached to it. Through returning to the place that I came from, the grief of my grandmother and mother finally started to make more sense, there was a linearity to their loss.
I could feel it in me, too.
When I found out about the severity of my grandmother’s cancer, my Dad took me to eat deep fried prawns next to the Civic on Pitt Street. It was late winter then, and he came to my share house in Glebe when the sunset was thin and opulently contained above the terrace houses, the orange of it going as far back West as you can possibly imagine, all the way to the very beginning of light.
We walked past dead eyed girls clutching pamphlets for erotic massage, them murmuring to my father as we passed through the maniacal circus of Pitt Street at rush hour. Inside the Civic, I drank a house red and Dad had a schooner of Coopers Green and I hoped, like I normally do, that people didn’t think that we were on a date. I have always called him DAD loudly in public, with a neutral ferocity, just so people don’t think I am a young brown girl with an old white man. I have been doing this since I was twelve years old.
“I don’t know how to handle this”. I said to him. “I’m so scared it’s gonna be like last time. How am I seriously meant to take this on, do you think?”
He looked at me thoughtfully, sipped his pale ale, stared out at the city. “Darl, this death isn’t a tragedy”, he said. “When my mum died, was I sad? Yes. Do I miss her everyday? Yes. But she was old. It was her time. You can’t let death take over your life”.
I thought to myself then, yeah mate - that’s easy for you to say. And don’t get me wrong, I think (pardon the pun) that you’re dead-set right. But there are no millennia-tested mourning manifestos specifically made for cultural hybrids.
For me, death has come speaking three different languages, and frankly, I can’t understand any of them as well as I want to.
When it comes to us and death, we have to make our own way.
During lockdown, I attended two zoom funerals on one day. They were both young people, taken far beyond their time. My boyfriend and I sat cross-legged on his bed and watched two different families buckle beneath their grief on a pixelated live feed - and yet, there were purple liquorice allsorts and Doc Martens and new age rock music. They were part of an Australia that I know intimately, one where funerals are held on beaches at golden hour and everyone wears bright colours and throws single blossoms into the gentle waves. Funerals where everyone drinks heavily in someone else’s garden and gingerly eats assorted Arnotts cream biscuits on a plastic plate, and someone else laughs too loudly, and someone will almost 16780% definitely say; “Ah well. It was their time”, and someone else will get really pissed and black out in a bathroom, and at the end of the service, there might be some desolate dancing to YMCA, because the person that’s gone was really into it.
I have always felt relieved in these funeral settings, to be honest. The lightness of them, the way nobody makes you directly responsible for their grief. I can speak fluently, and be understood. I get to go home and there are no strangers knocking on my door, chasing my mother from the morgue, dressed in black. But yet, there is always a part of me that waits quietly for the drop, for some kind of ceremony that appropriately marks death, and for a socially acceptable and culturally certified ability to let yourself loose to that wild animal sadness that is an imperative part of each human life.
It hasn’t happened yet.
In 21st century Australia, our majority culture is pistoned on a collective commitment to never allow anything to decay. Our food has to be shiny and wrapped in neurotic plastic, our collagen has to be plump and #onpoint, and when it comes to loss, we quite simply, just don’t want to know. We are, as numerous state premiers like to spout; AUSSIE BATTLERS, and, as numerous people have told me and my mother following moments of death, divorce and disease - to battle through it is the only way to do it. Stiff upper lip, our fore-parents would have said - at any cost.
I know now that there are dangers in this. Through denying grief and neglecting ceremony we can become rudderless and distraught, ill equipped to ever properly deal with the real darknesses of life. Beauty and sorrow, joy and suffering, they are all bound inextricably together. You can’t leave one out.
For me, death has come speaking three different languages, and frankly, I can’t understand any of them as well as I want to. Whether it is the universal tongue of human mortality, the Iranian ability to look loss hard in the face and take it as it is, or the Aussie Anglo way of celebrating loudly beneath the frangipanis, I have only just started to realise that for me, when death reaches out and taps my shoulder I have more than just one world to choose from. Now, I know, in some deep and honest part of myself, that when loss comes along in the late afternoon, I want to accept the truth of it, and then, when the time is right, to finally let it go.
It will be then, if I’m lucky, that everything will be coloured green. Bright, verdant and ultimately, everlasting.
This is entry was chosen from nearly 4000 entries to be jointly awarded the Highly Commended prize in the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition on the topic of 'Between Two Worlds'.
