INVISIBLE THREAD | Aishwarya Ghonge
My dad doesn’t ask me if I love him. He asks me if I remember how he would carry me everywhere in his arms, even after I turned ten. He asks me this every few days, even though my answer never changes. Of course, I remember him carrying me around the farmer's market on Sundays, my slightly-too-long-for-carrying legs dangling off his side, as I sniffed oranges and certified them as fresh or not fresh like a seasoned produce inspector. I remember finding carrots carved into little stars in my lunchbox, even though I ate the uncut ones just fine. I remember him smuggling fried shrimp from his plate to mine and winking, when my mom wasn’t looking. He keeps retrieving my memories of him and polishing them like silverware, keeping them pristine. I have always suspected he does this because he’s afraid of dying early, a fear I’ve harbored myself, for as long as I can remember.
It could be that he was an older dad, a decade senior to my classmates’ dads, which led me to worry I’d have less time with him. I blamed myself; I was late to my own birth by almost seven years after my parents started trying. In Marathi, they say “a child's feet are visible in its cradle,” which means you can see in its infancy a glimpse of the adult a child will become. My parents often joke that they should have foreseen my habitual tardiness in how long it took for me to be born. It also didn’t help that, as a nosy eight-year-old, I had hungrily read my kundali (which really should come with a child-proof lock), an astrological forecast detailing everything about my future, including when I and my loved ones would die. My parents, like many other Indian parents, got one made to honor my birth; a likely story. They probably just wanted to know if I would amount to anything.
Mine foretold that I would lose my dad to a short illness in 2023. Smart as I was, I cross-checked it against the year of his demise in his kundali, and in my mom’s kundali, and it all checked out. It never occurred to me that the same astrologer had written all three; I mistook the poppycock for facts. While other physicians trace their interest in medicine back to an altruistic urge or a passion for science, I trace it back to wanting my dad to live a long life. I wanted to take control of our destiny by becoming a competent doctor. A death-watcher really, ready to send any attempts on his life by Yama (a Hindu god of death), bolting through space.
I have since been on a meticulous (read: obsessive) lookout for any and all symptoms of his mortality; he has been forced to get all age-appropriate vaccines, routine check-ups, labs—the whole drill. One morning, while I was waiting to use the restroom, I noticed (as you do) the indecent amount of time he took to get started—and that his urinary stream sounded … slow. He had just turned sixty-six, and he was already way past the age his prostate cancer screening should have begun. When I suggested he go for a digital rectal exam to be safe, he manufactured the most creative excuses to avoid it. But after he complained about an unrelenting stomachache, I tricked him into seeing a gastroenterologist, who at my request, convinced him to get the exam. (“But why do I need a finger up my ass for a stomach bug?” Go figure, dad.) Turns out, he had early-stage prostate cancer.
We had caught it in time, and it had a good prognosis, as far as cancers go. Intellectually, I understood, and was grateful for that. Emotionally, it was a different story. My fear of losing him resurfaced and multiplied. When his biopsy result came in July 2022, I was in away rotations in the U.S., eight thousand miles from home. I wanted him to benefit from early intervention, but I also couldn’t stand the thought of him undergoing the first major surgery of his life without me there to hold his hand, or to help him with his recovery. Or at least that is what I told myself. A selfish part of me worried that if something went wrong, I wouldn’t be able to cope with my shame of not having been there in person because I was tending to my career. Thankfully, the more reasonable side of me won over and urged him to get scheduled for prostate removal surgery on the earliest date available.
On the day of, I stayed up all night to call him before he was wheeled into the operating room. He kept a brave face throughout our call, battling his trembling lip that threatened to curdle his composure. He tried to make light of his situation by joking that he’d be coming out less of a man than going in, how he'd be aging backwards and returning to diapers, and so on. This continued for a good part of an hour, until he realized I was laughing at all the wrong places, and tapered off. I was trying to be attentive but I couldn’t stop doomscrolling through the list of complications of TURP (transurethral resection of prostate) on UpToDate.
Then he asked me, ‘Do you remember how you once fell from the sofa and refused to walk, and I had to keep massaging your knees for a week until you did?’ I smiled and said I did. I was told he had a good, long cry after our call.
I spent that night feeling guilty. I kept thinking about all the times I could have made an effort to be more present in our conversations. I worried he didn’t know how much I loved him. Throughout my life, I have never felt as though I have belonged anywhere in particular. Any sense of belonging has come from recognizing the outline of my jaw in my mom, or the shape of my nose in my dad—that undeniable joy you feel when finding yourself in a loved one’s features. Look—this is where I come from—the big bang of my consciousness! In your parents, you find a genetic blueprint of how you may age, of what might afflict you. It takes you a step closer to knowing parts of yourself with some certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. That is what makes anticipating the loss of your parents so hard—you risk losing your one established link to the universe. A witness to the entirety of your existence.
When my father finally drifted out of anesthesia, my mom video-called me, ending the hallucinated countdown to 2023 I'd been tabulating through the night. I was not prepared to see him like that. For a man who has always kept healthy, he looked awfully small and helpless in his threadbare hospital gown. That was all the push I needed to let out the pent-up emotions: I cried, awash with a mixture of pain that he had to undergo the surgery at all, relief at his return to safety and jubilation at having thwarted his death (this time). I was overcome with such tenderness I felt it reverberating in every atom of my being.
A few months later, I was back in my living room, joshing with my parents, and soon fell victim to their jokes. It is every parent’s prerogative to tease their child that they are, in fact, adopted. I, myself, never took the bait. Mine changed their adoption story a LOT, and their stories got more outlandish in successive iterations. In the latest version, I was being sold by a fisherwoman alongside her catch of the day, when my parents took pity and purchased me for a grand total of three hundred dollars. I know. I was secure in my knowledge, having seen photographs of my mom cradling her baby bump in her blue hospital gown being wheeled into surgery, of my dad holding a newly-born me, wrapped in a maroon towel. How could they have manufactured all of that evidence?
But still, something bothered me. Call it a gut feeling. The first time I had this sinking feeling was in eighth grade, when I asked my parents why my blood group was A negative while theirs was both A positive (this was before developing a working knowledge of genetics). At that time, they had flippantly dismissed me with clever remarks but something in their expression had not matched the levity of their dismissal. Then, just a few months before my dad’s surgery, I discovered my prenatal chart with startling details of my conception through IVF. My enquiries into the nature of my birth circumstances were yet again met with cagey non-answers. So, this time, when they joked about adopting me, I jokingly asked if the spermatic contribution to my conceptus had even come from my dad. I don’t know why I asked such a specific question, or what came over me. The shock, evident on their faces, told me it hadn’t. My mom looked from me, as I stood there stunned into place, to my dad who was staring at his feet, seemingly with shame at having failed me by not contributing to my biological makeup.
When he finally looked up, a weight shifted from his eyes to my shoulders, as we both stood there, waiting for some primal urge to search for my biological father to show itself, as if a stranger could have a stronger claim to my love than my dad did. The fact that urge didn’t exist, not even in the deepest recesses of my heart, was a little anticlimactic, truth be told. As morbid as it is, I have been preparing to lose my parents ever since I first understood that everyone dies. Especially old people. I have played it a thousand times over in my mind, hoping pre-grieving would make the actual loss less paralyzing. Of all the ways of loss I had anticipated though, this wasn’t one. But what was this a loss of, really? At most, this was a loss of my genetic history, not my parentage. Maybe we didn’t have the same nose like I had always imagined, but I still had his dry sense of humor and love of creative arts. He was still my dad.
As soon as we realized I wasn’t going anywhere, he slumped into his chair, tension visibly leaving his muscles in a vapor of exhausted relief around him. In that moment, I realized how long he had carried this with him, this fear of losing me, as I had of losing him, and found an invisible thread of our shared fear, connecting us. When he asks me if I remember how he would swing me by my arms, he isn’t asking me if I love him. He is asking me if I love him enough never to leave him. After all, what is fear of loss, but love turned on its head, greedy for more?
I shrugged. He reciprocated with a guilty smile. I told him how relieved I was that I wouldn’t have to worry about going bald now, to which he glared, and left the room. Too soon.
Aishwarya Ghonge is an international medical graduate from San Francisco Bay Area, who divides her time between research at Stanford University SOM, and furtive daydreaming. When she is not outlining the idea of her next essay, you can find her petting the neighborhood cats or sampling perfumes at Nordstrom. Her new favorite word is pandiculation.