First published in American Literary Review on 31 August 2022. Content warning: death of a parent.
From the author:
In 2018, two years after my father passed away, I found the courage and the words to articulate my feelings, and the very first version of this piece was written. I wanted to write about my grief, get it out of my system. But somehow all I could do was recreate the moment my grief began. At first, the words were just a memory on paper, so I could read, relive, and reopen the scabbed-over wounds. Over the years, as the piece transformed with my age, my experiences, and my understanding of myself, I began seeing it as what it truly was: an effort to immortalize my grief, my everything in that moment, and my father.
Why can’t I honour my father in a more conventional fashion and write about our happiest moments was a question that plagued me for years. But try as I might, nothing came close to evoking the visceral feeling in me that this piece did. When the piece took the form that it is in now: objective, seen through an imaginary camera lens, I wondered whether I’d stripped myself away entirely from it. And then I added the final piece of the puzzle: the title. By titling it ‘Pitching A Scene To My Dad,’ it at once became a lament, became a subjective expression of grief.
This is the moment I’d have liked for my father to see and comfort me for: how I felt, how brave I was, how I held myself together. But it’s the one moment he could never witness. This is the last I saw of him, and so this is how I honour him: by making it known that I remember him still, that I will never forget. His nothing will remain my everything.
Imagine a MONTAGE in a film (don’t ask what genre of film, it’s still being written): we open with a WIDE SHOT of a busy airport, and suddenly in the midst, we see a pop of fuchsia—ZOOM IN, it’s a girl, about twenty, wearing a fuchsia cardigan—while the VOICE-OVER (I don’t know whose) says, “The thing about embraces that envelop and encompass is that they are said to have miraculous healing powers of the emotional kind,” and there’s CLOSE-UPS of the girl’s red-rimmed eyes, trembling lips, tears dripping down her chin, while the VOICE-OVER continues, “Embraces of this kind, you’re lucky to have a variety of, but finding one, The One, means you’re blessed,” and we CUT TO the girl seated in the plane, head against the window pane, ignoring the fluffy clouds—INSERT a shot of the fluffy clouds—and MATCH CUT TO storm clouds, TILT DOWN from the angry sky to the girl dashing out of the airport followed by QUICK CUTS of rain pouring, the girl getting into a taxi, travel shots, the girl getting out of the taxi, splashing through puddles, coming home to a roaring of mourners, and the stillness of death—a man lies in a casket, while a woman weeps (that’s her father and mother) and the girl crumples to the floor and we CUT TO BLACK over which the VOICE-OVER says, “And you’re cursed, if the One embrace you seek in your moment of grief belongs to the one you grieve.”
Mugdhaa Ranade wakes up every day hoping to find dry leaves to crunch underfoot, and stray cats to pet. She can be found in person in Mumbai, India, and online on Twitter @swxchhxnd.
Thank you for reading!
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