Playful Despair

This piece is dedicated to all the daughters who’ve lost their fathers, and to all the fathers out there, living or lost. Especially our beautiful Palestinian fathers. We see you. We carry you in our prayers as you carry the ummah in your arms and tears. <3

[A quick funny backstory to the title of this piece. Months ago, when I was lovingly bullied into entering the world of zine making, my perfectionism was tested. (There’s a reason I hate arts and crafts, haha.) I was trying to find the *right* font for my Clean Beauty BDS zine that I spent almost two hours scrolling through every option in Canva until I found the one. I glanced to catch the name of the font: Playful Despair. Without a second thought, I accepted the name and proceeded to finish editing the piece before it hit me. Who would name a font like that? I took another look only to discover the font is actually called Playfair Display. A big thank you to stress brain and delayed neurology appointments. *insert anxiously laughing emoji*]

Weeks before Father’s Day, I began writing out little tidbits of my pain—and there have been plenty. I wrote and deleted, wrote and edited, wrote and reflected, till eventually I abandoned what I feared would sound under-prepared or over-cliched or redundant. How many times can a daughter grieve the father who only died once?

But see, my dad’s death is a Russian nesting doll that I alone discovered in the perpetuity of his passing. It was nestled in plain sight, somewhere between the lines of the words he struggled to say.

I’ve uncovered five dolls so far, each more weary than her sister before. I take a bird’s eye view, try and assess how many more grief girls I have left to unfold, and find a black void where all the answers should have been.

What no one ever warned me of is that the longer a dad stays in the house of death, the bigger a daughter’s grief can grow. Or maybe no one else was afflicted with this kind of phenomenon. My life has always been some sort of eternal opposite day, and this could just be another one for the list, right under dehydration when I drink more water, getting sick every time I eat healthy, being sleepier when I get 7-8 full hours of sleep, or—despite not being a believer in astrology—my life getting better when Mercury is in retrograde. What makes grief any different of a category? Growing as swiftly as the tumor that swallowed my dad’s brain, left to right.

Whenever the doctors talked about it, I imagined a hybrid between Dormammu (from Doctor Strange) and the fat ghost uncle from Casper, crawling like a heavy caterpillar on its belly, across the ridges of my dad’s grayed out pink brain. Poisoning the matter on every inch of the path beneath it.

Eventually, he made his rounds and took dad’s brain hostage. I watched that last exhale, a faint white breath into the hospital’s cold air. 6:24 p.m. A Thursday. My favorite day of the week. The same day I was born on 31 years before.

But that breath of his was like a time release capsule, an unpinned grenade I swallowed with a detonation I await. It didn’t explode at first, more of a subtle leak of grief from the pin prick of life. But with every year, the hole grows, and every time I think I’ve swum through the worst of the waves, another Russian doll clutches me by the throat. Whispering hauntings in my ear, things I know my dad wanted to say. The dirt of his grave cakes under my almond nails as I dig for answers to all the questions I should have asked him.