By Ramya Sampath
Many people have suggested that I keep my father, Appa, in my memory by talking to him. Write him a letter, talk to him while you drive to work, tell him things you always wanted to tell him. For the first few days after he died, this felt ridiculous. Why would I speak out loud to someone who isn’t in the room? Nonsense, I will tell him when he comes home, I’d instinctively think.
Gradually, I have rehearsed this unintuitive idea that he will not be coming home again. Now, only years later, it occurs to me that perhaps there is value in speaking into thin air. Perhaps he will hear me with his new ethereal form that transcends the physics of sound. I open my mouth to speak, to pronounce to him my thoughts in an overly formalistic way (suitable for a task as grandiose as speaking to an invisible person), yet my speech is stopped in my throat by a sudden stage fright. It is only in this moment that I must confront the terror and vulnerability of speech and the reasons why I have needed years to muster up this courage: If he does not respond, maybe then I will have to accept his gone-ness.
At many points during medical school, I have felt strong urges to text him in the middle of class sessions on any of the myriad pathologies from which he suffered, particularly relating to kidney disease. Once in a class session about parathyroid hormone and its dysregulation in end stage renal disease (ESRD), I instinctively reached for my phone to text Appa about what I was learning. Finally, it made sense to me why he needed mealtime fistfuls of “phosphorous-getters,” as he called his phosphate-binding medications. It was the first time in at least a year that I had such an instinct. I had forgotten momentarily that I could no longer text him in the same way that I can text Amma to remind her to take her antihypertensives.
Another time, while studying about ESRD late into the evening, I was similarly possessed by an urge to text Appa. Perhaps uninhibited by exhaustion and the particular goal-directedness that grips me late into the night, this time I thought brashly, What could possibly happen? I’ll just send this message into the ether. I quickly thumbed a text to his number, earnestly and unceremoniously, without the stage fright of speech: “Thank you Appa for teaching me everything I know about ESRD.”
Delivered.
I felt a moment of peace, gratitude that I could tell him somehow even if he would never receive it in any terrestrial form. A sense of relief that I could still tell him how I felt.
Yet immediately my mind flooded with the practical realities of telecommunications. We had discontinued his line, so who had his number now? How would I feel if they texted me back and their text appeared in the same chat as Appa’s last texts to me? What would I even say to them? “Oh sorry, wrong number”? Or perhaps I could tell them the truth: “I meant to just text my thoughts into the ether hoping my deceased father would somehow know what I was saying. This makes sense according to my transcendentalist perspectives on the continuity of personhood after death. Sorry to bother you.”
Read.
The new recipient had read my text at 12:49 a.m. For a flickering moment of unabashed hope, I wondered, Did Appa read my message? Swiftly batting away this illogic, a new set of anxieties and inquietudes rushed into my spiraling thoughts. Should I text this new person back to tell them, “Sorry wrong number. I knew it all along but I didn’t know” ? Or “Don’t worry, you can block me,” or “Who are you, and will you cherish this phone number?” ? Do you know what ESRD is? Do you know that Appa is not a name, but the Tamil word for father?
Then I wondered, Should I delete this text? Its presence is a painful reminder even as it sits idle, unchanged, until it would eventually move to the bottom of my message queue to live with all the messages from people with whom I rarely communicate. Should I keep this message solely to remind myself of this sad fit of desperation? Keep it as some kind of poetic tribute to the anachronism of feelings?
How wonderful it would be if I could put my hands together in prayer, my steepled fingers a conduit to the spirit realm, and beam to him my thoughts. I’ve thought often of what I would say to him, what updates I would give him, what profound truths I’d ask him for. Often what I crave, beyond the ability to update him on the pathophysiology of his health conditions, is merely the simple continuity of a quotidian relationship — being able to call him while walking to class and give him updates on my burgeoning plant collection, what dishes I’ve been cooking, what I bought recently at Namaste Plaza, our surprisingly spectacular Indian grocery store in Rochester. But telling him about all the new snacks at the grocery store feels like a waste of the precious time we have; I imagine my line to him now as a flickering connection, a line that is as choppy, precarious, and mysterious as that of early’90s international phone calls. Perhaps I ought to update him like a relative with whom I have not spoken in years, with only the most important highlights and the bird’s-eye view of everyone’s wellbeing. But giving him updates on our family’s health and job prospects seems unnecessary; surely he knows everything already. After all, he is omniscient now. I want to know what he wants to know about. In his state of transcendence, he surely does not care anymore about cricket matches or the stock market or politics. He might still care about space travel, the weather, rare species discovered in parts of the world he only could travel to when he was alive through Rick Steves’ videos and by visiting questionable news sites that may have been responsible for the “computer bugs” with which he seemed to have always struggled.
I suppose the only thing worth telling him is, “I love you. I miss you.” I hope he already knows that too.
Would you like to delete this conversation?
As I deleted the text from my phone, a shudder passed through my entire body, rippling out to my fingers, dissipating into the air.