It’s been twenty-one days since Mama return to the mercy of Allah SWT. I keep counting. I don’t know why, maybe because numbers stay still, while everything else keeps slipping. Twenty-one feels both too short and too long. Three weeks is nothing. Yet three weeks is forever.
Last Sunday I missed her in a way that made my whole body restless. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t pray properly, couldn’t even distract myself with chores. The missing doesn’t always look like tears; sometimes it looks like pacing around the house, opening the fridge without hunger, picking up my phone and putting it down again. It’s absurd how the world keeps working, markets opening, emails pinging, traffic crawling when mine split apart into “before” and “after.”
And here’s the part I almost don’t want to write: jealousy.
I feel jealous. Petty, sharp jealousy. That I only got thirty-two years with her. That other people still get decades, still have mothers to hug, to call, to roll their eyes at. They post Sunday lunches, birthday cakes, “quality time” photos. I scroll and it burns. I tell myself, don’t be unfair, you don’t know their lives, but grief doesn’t care about fairness. It wants what it wants, and what it wants is impossible.
I’m jealous too of my brother. Mama came to him in a dream. She hasn’t come to me. I try to shrug it off, dreams are nothing but brain static. But still, when he told me, something inside me dropped. Why not me? Doesn’t she know how much I need her? Or maybe I should be grateful she hasn’t come. Maybe it would undo me, waking up to her shadow. Both thoughts live in me, pulling in opposite directions.
Monday morning I noticed something strange. I ate breakfast like usual. I went to work like usual. I talked, answered emails, typed. My body seems to have signed a contract with life: keep going, even if the soul refuses. But my prayers are different now. Heavier, sharper. Less ritual, more raw. My prayers feel like the only way left to love her, to say, I haven’t forgotten. I won’t forget. I’m still here, still yours.
And then there’s this contradiction I keep circling. I want to be around my siblings more than my husband. He has been everything, my rock, my wall, my beam of fragile home, my quiet supporter, grieving with me. He lost Mama too. Mama is his mother too. His grief is real, and I don’t discount it. But with my siblings, it’s something else. Something wordless. We share decades of nonsense and mess, fought over ridiculous things, slammed doors, borrowed clothes without asking, laughed at jokes that only make sense to us. With them, I don’t need to translate this pain. They know the exact shape of it, because it tore through them too. With him, it’s love. With them, it’s memory. And right now, memory is the only thing that feels like oxygen.
But even memory feels fragile. My memory is a terrible storage. Right after something happens, it feels sharp, alive, like I’ll be able to keep it forever. Then later, when I reach for it, it’s already changing shape, broken into fragments, rearranged into something else entirely. That’s why I write. I don’t have a camera for every second, nor I don’t have the tools to preserve her voice or her hands exactly as they were. All I have are words, my way of telling myself the story before it slips. Maybe that’s another contradiction, remembering and losing, at the same time.
Still, some things cling. Like how she played two Candy Crush games at once and somehow reached level six-thousand on both, while I was stuck at barely a hundred. She would laugh, then help me through a level like it was nothing. Or the way she always answered the phone: “Assalamualaikum, Kakak…” Her voice in that greeting, warm, playful, steady comes back to me at the strangest times, and it both comforts me and rips me apart.
I don’t know how to explain this: grief makes me both softer and meaner. I feel grateful for tiny kindnesses, a glass of water handed to me, someone asking if I’ve eaten but I also feel sharp, resentful, like the world owes me something it can’t give back. I can pray like a saint in the morning and scroll like a bitter cynic at night. I can say “I’m okay” with a straight face and then suddenly snap at someone for asking a harmless question. Maybe grief is just contradiction stretched into daily life.
Nothing about this makes sense. Nothing fits neatly. I want to move on and I want to hold on. I want Mama’s voice to leave me alone because it hurts, and I want it to stay forever because it’s all I have left. I want dreams of her and I don’t want them, because waking up would be brutal.
So here I am, twenty-one days in. Eating. Praying. Wishing. Writing. Counting. Contradicting myself at every turn. Maybe that’s what grief is living in a world where sense doesn’t live anymore, where the only honest thing to do is admit that nothing feels fair, and love doesn’t know where to go except upwards.
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