Sorry for the Inconvenience: A Memoir

by Farah Naz Rishi

What I felt was more of an inevitable, inexplicable connection.

Except cruelty can also be stealthy and insidious. Like dismissing one’s feelings, over and over again—until one day you start to forget how to feel anything.

His relationship with his faith wasn’t based on fear, but on love and respect. He loved God,

be steadfast with religion, but appreciate and enjoy the gift of life. And good music, he felt, brought us closer to God.

That’s the beauty of siblings, I think. You don’t need words. After growing up in the same dysfunctional household for years, you develop your own special telepathy, your own secret language: of facial expressions only the two of you can read, of inside jokes only the two of you understand, of memories only the two of you share. You get each other, perhaps in a way no one else ever will.

But I hated being in a world that demanded women protect themselves instead of punishing the men who would harm them in the first place.

But real, meaningful change needs no announcement. Real change speaks for itself.

It was a bad habit of mine to envision the worst-case scenario, an almost compulsive need to prepare myself for the worst possibilities.

Most of us will outlive our parents; we accept this. But watching your parents’ bodies be whittled down by disease is unsettling in ways that will haunt you for life. It was brutal to watch, brutal to leave.

The fact was, Dad had been robbed of his light. Divine plan or not, it still, simply put, sucked.

Instead, grief had obliterated me, leaving me so empty, so broken, I could hardly feel anything at all.

I’d met dozens of people in the previous weeks, people who’d claimed to know and love my father, though I’d never seen them before.

I think about that moment a lot, in part because of how strangely calm I’d felt. In truth, I thought that when Dad did die, I’d feel an uncontrollable rush of emotion and burst into tears: the obvious, natural reaction to a parent dying of cancer.

I’d been doing that a lot lately: imagining hypothetical scenarios and what-ifs consisting of the worst possible situations. What will I do the moment Dad dies? What will I do when I miss him, when I have a question only he can answer? What will I do at his funeral, when I watch them lower his body into the earth and I know I will never see his face again? I’d walk myself through each god-awful hypothetical in what was a (perhaps weird) morbid attempt at mentally preparing myself, just in case. Just in case. Maybe the mental preparation had worked, after all.

Verily, to God we belong and to God we shall return. But what was the prayer for the people left behind?

Time had started moving again, but it was moving so fast I could hardly keep track. Already fifteen minutes had passed. I’d been living in a world without Dad for nearly fifteen minutes.

Our paths had diverged, the way they often do in long friendships. And now here she was in my bedroom, like nothing had changed. She’d come back into my life when it really mattered,

The time after Dad’s death was a blur.

Since Dad died, I’d become unreasonably terrified of being sick. Even with symptoms of a cold, my brain would immediately jump to the worst-case scenario. Dad had pancreatic cancer. What if the cancer was genetic? What if I inherited the gene, too? What if cancer was ravaging me and it was too late to treat? I’d also become terrified of my loved ones getting sick, or worse.

The profound, perhaps inevitable realization that your parents are just people—with flaws and imperfections—feels like mourning.

Sometimes I wondered if people used religion as an excuse to ignore the humanity of others, and instead reduce them to their sins.

“a time of patience will come to people in which adhering to one’s religion is like grasping a hot coal.”

But I think faith is never easy. That’s why it’s faith. You can always ease back into it when you’re ready.

For now, just focus on being a good person; the rest will follow.

For reasons beyond me, he’d only ever been looking and waiting for me. And those many kindnesses he had shown me throughout the years didn’t come with the expectation I’d love him in return. His love would never be conditional. It never had been.

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

I found that losing them made me love harder. These small, brief moments of joy—I treasured them that much more.