Family Grief
All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered
Naz Riahi reflects on how the violent death of her father when she was a young girl impacted the rest of her life
1.
My Baba died of a heart attack.
My Baba died in a car accident.
My Baba died of cancer.
What kind? Lung. Heart. Bone. Blood.
My Baba died in a car accident, because he had a heart attack. He was also sick with cancer.
My Baba died.
My Baba was killed.
None of that is accurate.
Only this is true: I was strong.
2.
When we immigrated to the United States from Iran, my mother told me not to tell anyone what had happened to my Baba, to our family, to me.
I was nine years old. I’d spent the year before staying quiet and out of the way, not wanting to cause any trouble, not wanting to make things more difficult for her. It was already a bad, sad year.
Staying quiet in our new country was an extension of that silence, easier than everything that had come before it. I promised her I wouldn’t say how he’d died, why we’d left Iran, why we lived here now. But she didn’t give me an alternate story. So, I had to imagine the accident, the bad heart, the cancer—absorbable, familiar tragedies. The kinds of things that happened to all sorts of families.
In fourth grade, I didn’t speak English yet, so I could stay silent. In fifth grade, I listened to my classmate Reva tell our class about the Mickey Mouse pancakes her dad made for breakfast and I imagined how happy their mornings were. I hated her for it. In sixth grade, I made him a painting in art class for Father’s Day, just as the other kids did for their alive dads. We were studying Monet. I blotted paint on a piece of paper and said to myself in a whisper, “I think he’ll like this.”
In seventh grade, I wrote an essay about my family and had to mention his death; it was unavoidable. So, I wrote it like it was nothing. Just a fact without details. After reading my essay, the teacher came up to me and asked me how he’d died. She asked loud enough for my tablemates to hear. That’s when I said car accident for the first time, though by then I’d been imagining saying it for years. “I’m sorry,” she said.
In eighth grade, I got my own phone line and shortly after, Jared, a boy who bullied me, called and yelled into the line, “I know your dad is dead! Your dad is dead!” and hung up. I dialed star-sixty-nine and listened to the automation of his phone number said back to me. I didn’t tell anyone.
3.
I hated the way my mother cried. I hated how her face morphed hideously. I hated her pathetic, loud grief and how it was visible to the world through her black clothes (a year of mourning), through her gray hair (a year of worry), through her red eyes (a year of crying). I hated that she always gave me birthday gifts from my Baba. I hated that the ones from him were the ones I wanted most—a fancy doll, a Nintendo set. I hated their useless transcendence of worlds, their stain of death.
I hated that I couldn’t talk about him without crying. I hated my own tears, my own grief. I swallowed it all and piled as much food as I could on top of it. I hated that I once accidentally called my uncle Baba . And once accidentally called my best friend’s father dad . I hated all the photos of him around our house, a shrine on every wall, on every table, at every occasion. “He’s always with us,” my mother would say.
Except, he wasn’t.
I hated the photos in their ornate frames, but I hated that she took them down when she remarried even more. I never called him step-dad. You can’t replace a dead dad. I stayed strong.
4.
I hated him most of all. He could have lived, and yet he chose political conviction over life. He left us. He left me.
So, I left him. I didn’t talk about him. Not to my mother, not to my brother, not to my friends. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t replay my memories of him. I wanted to erase him.
If I had to have his death, I didn’t want his life.
5.
My Baba was a high-ranking captain in the Iranian Navy. He flew helicopters. He fought in a war. He was tall, but only because I was little. If he’d lived, I would have seen that 5’7” is not tall. I have a few memories of him. Now, I replay them often. But it took me a long time to be able to. All the effort to erase him, all the anger, all the lies—they were a heavy burden. One day, I finally said something. I had to in order to survive. I told my best friend and waited to unravel. When I didn’t, when I stayed strong, I told a few other friends, then, slowly, it all came out.
It comes out now.
“I’m sorry,” everyone says.
“It’s fine,” I always reply. I’m strong .
*
My memories of him, the few I have, are of our activities together. I remember how he made me breakfast on his days off, like Reva’s dad made for her, how we swam in a friend’s pool once, how we recorded our voices, becoming characters in an improvised story. I recall going down a steep slide with him on a family trip to Izmir. I remember the bedtime stories he would tell.
If I had to have his death, I didn’t want his life.
But mostly, I know my Baba the way I might know a famous actor—distantly. He was kind and fiercely intelligent , I’ve been told. Studious and organized.
“He was a good swimmer, like you,” my mother says. “He was stubborn and candid, like you,” my brother, who is twelve years older and knew him better, tells me. “The bottom half of his face looked just like yours.” It feels as though they’re trying to convince me that he and I existed, though briefly, at once. That, more than just coming from him, I carry him on.
I envy all the things they know first-hand, all the time they spent with him, all of the memories that will never be mine. But I’m also desperate to know him, so my only choice is to listen. To listen and try not to cry.
6.
They came to our house, the government officials, and they ransacked it. I was eight years old and kept thinking, when Baba gets home, he’ll take care of this. He’ll deal with them. They’ll be sorry. In the meantime, I sat on the couch with my mother as strangers pillaged our house, tearing open drawers, pulling out mattresses, turning over cushions, removing rugs—like a scene from a movie. Chaos. They found our contraband: playing cards, western music, Disney cartoons, homemade wine. I thought they’d take it all and leave. But that’s not why they’d come.
My mother asked if she could get my doll for me and they said no, ordered us to sit still. My mother asked if I could go to the bathroom and they said no. Ordered us to be quiet. I cried. In my memory I am floating above the living room, looking down, as scary men pull our life apart.
*
When Baba got home, I floated back down. He told us everything would be all right. He spoke with the men in another room and then came out and said, “I have to go back to work for a little bit.”
I ran after him, out the front door.
“The VCR is broken and I can’t watch Cinderella,” I said. It was all I could think of to keep him from going.
He came back toward the house, picked me up in his arms, and kissed me.
I wrapped my arms and legs around him tightly. He could have let go and I wouldn’t have fallen.
“I’ll fix it when I get home,” he said.
“Do you promise?”
“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”
I was relieved. He’d never break a promise to me.
From our front door, I watched him walk away, escorted by two men. He entered the back seat of a sedan. It was February. Our grass was yellow and dry. The honeysuckle that adorned the fence around our house wouldn’t come in for some months. The long branches of the white birch trees that lined our street were bare. The songbirds were gone. The sun hadn’t set yet. I could see everything. I watched the car drive away and disappear down the street.
7.
I dream about him. In my dreams, there is an unreachable distance between us. I see him in other dimensions or we talk on the phone. He says he’s been calling, sending me letters all these years. But I haven’t received them, even though I’ve been waiting, desperate for any sign of him.
What cruel madness.
*
My mother spent nine months trying to save his life. I tagged along. I tried to help. We went to offices and courts, begged officials. We visited him in prison when they allowed us. I saw him through a plexiglass window. It had tiny holes. I stuck my thumb, my pointer, and middle fingers through them and touched his fingers on the other side. Other times I saw him through a glass partition, each of us lifting a receiver to our ears. I showed him my report card, my good grades. I saw him in the lobby of a government building once. They took my mother and me into a room and left us alone with him. I thought it was a chance encounter. I thought it was luck. “The room was probably bugged,” my mother would later say. I pulled off my hijab and showed him how long my hair was. I sat next to him on a bench, pushed my body against his, placed my head on his shoulder, lifted his arm and buried myself beneath it, held his hand in mine, fingers woven. He whispered to my mother and I tried to overhear. What I heard, about the condition in his cell, in his life, was devastating. I didn’t want him to think I knew about this indignity. So, I stopped listening. I focused on his hand. I inhaled his smell. I looked at his hair, his grown-out beard, his tired eyes.
Another time, I saw him in the room of a trailer in the prison yard. The sun was shining brightly through the windows. There were no chairs or couches. He sat on a rug on the floor, my mother and grandmother, too. I sat on his lap. He hugged me and kissed me and talked to us, but I don’t remember what he said.
I pretended that everything would be okay. I wanted him to feel happy. I pretended that maybe he would just walk out with us, come home. If I prayed hard enough. That is the cruelty of God.
In my dreams, there is an unreachable distance between us. 8.
I moved to the US. I learned a new language, and then another. I went to college. I lived in Spain. I graduated. I moved to New York City. I got jobs. I got into grad school. I fell in love. I got married. I moved to California. I had my heart broken. I got divorced. I got fired. I started a company. I wrote a book. I published stories. I was invited to the White House and President Obama read and responded to my essay about the visit.
My Baba didn’t see any of that. He doesn’t know me. He never will.
I failed a lot, too. I moved a lot. I was sad a lot. I lost a lot. I was alone so much. I wondered, often, how my life would have been different, better, safer, if he’d lived. Would he have taught me how to change a tire? Would he have paid my rent when money was tight? Would I have known which men were lying? Would I now be less scared, less scarred?
9.
Nine months. He was in prison for nine months. We tried to save him for nine months. He was tortured for nine months. He was brave for nine months.
When I am brave, I am brave for him.
Sometimes, I close my eyes and enter his prison cell. I sit down on the cement floor next to him in the dark, damp room I heard him whisper about to my mother. I scan his body, imagining where his skin has broken open. I gently run my fingers over his wounds, his scars, softly move from his wrists up his arms and down his back. I tell him he is not alone, that he never was. I ask him to let me carry his pain for a while. It pulses through me, moves up my arms and my back, catches in my throat, gathers in a lump and stays there for days at a time.
It’s been thirty years since he was executed. That’s the word I couldn’t say. He was hung. That’s the moment I can’t stop thinking about. It’s been thirty years since I heard the news on the radio in a taxi and looked out the window at the rainy streets of Tehran as my mother, seated next to me, screamed at the top of her lungs. It’s been thirty years since that night when I began to stay quiet and strong.
When I am brave, I am brave for him. It’s been thirty years that I’ve imagined him to be alive, hiding somewhere in the world, living a good life, checking on me online.
“It’s been thirty years,” I text my brother. “That’s a lifetime.”
He calls me right away, “Baba?”
“Yeah.”
We’re both silent for a beat. We’re both pushing our tears down, steadying our voices for each other.
“It is a lifetime,” he says.
I thought it would get easier. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t get better or less violent or less tragic or less painful. There’s just a further distance between us. Between me and him and the things I remember about him, fading. With each passing year, we are more strangers.
