Under the bell jar live ten thousand goodbyes. Some are screaming. Some are crying. Some lay silent at the bottom, suffocated by the others. All of them belong to me, sad creatures of a sad life. When I count them, I lose count.
Perhaps I’ll try counting backward, starting from yesterday, from kissing the soft furry ear of Waffle, from leaving his house, looking back through the glass door at him, sitting on his dog bed watching me go, panting in pain from the cancer slowly killing him. This is my final view of him. Tomorrow he will die and I will never see him again. When I cry for him, I cry for Briggs and for Buddy, for Stubby and Sparky and Frosty, for the best of all life’s creatures, the ones who love us (despite us), the ones we don’t deserve, the ones that cannot hurt us except in their deaths. Of all things that have to die, dogs and children deserve it the least.
My dogs in childhood died without goodbyes. Just an escape to the street when I was far away from home, both of them hit by cars, both deaths, both bodies a scene I had to imagine unfolding. There is mercy in not witnessing the death but also a sense of lost bewilderment. They were here, and now they’re not. A piece from time is missing. I was not there. I could not stroke their fur at the last beat of their heart. I could not be a witness to their presence and then their absence on this earth. In that void, the ache beats so hard you feel you will choke on it.
When they tell me in our temporary house in America that my dog in my home in Pakistan was killed, I scream like a wounded animal. Instinctually, I run to the sanctuary of my bedroom, but I don’t make it. I collapse at the top of the stairs and spill my body over the carpet, across the hall, into the doorway of my room. My dad runs after me and sits there with me on the floor as I scream in agony, in anger, in pain. Unbearable pain.
It’s so unbearable, I suddenly stop crying. I tell myself to stop. Even one more sob may stop my own heart from beating any further. I couldn’t save my dog. I must save myself. Do not cry anymore. So I lie with my wet cheek pressed into the carpet, and I don’t move, and I don’t feel anything anymore.
As I walk dogs, I take pictures of the dead things I see. A small snake, twisted and bloodied. The skin of a frog, its insides long since squished out, washed away, and dried up. Birds caught in Vesuvian horror, perfectly intact except for the missing eyes. Why do I do this? My husband thinks I’m crazy. Perhaps I’m giving them a funeral. Perhaps I want to be a witness to their death. Perhaps I don’t want to leave them to decay alone. Yes, maybe that’s it. I don’t want them to be alone, to be forgotten, to be nothing on this earth. I don’t want them to be the way I feel, splattered across a bed of grass or asphalt, reminding me I’m next. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. How will I feel when I say goodbye to this earth?
But that is for the future. For now, I must keep counting back.
I have to gloss over the deaths of three grandparents, not because I didn’t cry but because they were expected losses, planned goodbyes. Because I witnessed their dead bodies, because I dressed up and went to church, because I wrote down what I wanted to say and I said it to a sanctuary full of people, because I put their ashes in the ground. These are proper goodbyes and not the goodbyes I’m really talking about.
Because when my siblings visited me in Korea and then left to go home again, I sat on my bed and cried harder than for all three grandparents combined. I cried so hard, I remember thinking, “I’m hurting my heart. My actual heart. The muscle is actually tearing. Perhaps it will kill me young.”
I was going home in four months. I would see my family again. So what was causing such anguish? I’ll tell you what. Because for one week, I had felt at home again, when for eight long months I had been so completely and utterly alone. Eight months is a long time to be alone. To spend holidays working and then retreating to my room with a boxful of donuts. To spend every minute of every day unable to take a deep breath because of the crushing anxiety and the deafening dread and the aching aloneness surrounding it all.
I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
I’d prefer to go further back.
I can tell you about crying on the airplane when I left my family to go study abroad. Or when I bawled my eyes out, hugging my mom goodbye before leaving for a week-long youth group trip. But these goodbyes are merely leftover residue from the real ones. The real ones are scathing. They lash at the back of my throat like whips. They are the unspoken, and this is why they burn.
If I had known that I would cry for the rest of my life if I didn’t cry then, maybe I would have let the tears come. But at seven years old, your life is only the moment you are in, and that moment threatened to drown me if I let even one tear fall.
It’s a Sunday at 5 pm, and the smells from the week’s leftovers reheating are floating out from the dining hall into the entryway to the dorm. We will have to eat these remnants at 5:30, with our stomachs in knots and our throats on fire. I do not want to eat, and I do not want to stay there, and I do not want to say goodbye to my parents and my little sister. But my mom is hugging me, and she’s so soft, and then my dad is hugging me, and he’s so hard, but if my body had its way, I would cling to him like a life raft and scream and cry and pound his chest until they took me home.
I also know they won’t take me home. This is the way of the missionary. This is the way of their childhoods, leaving their parents to go to school. This is what we do.
So I gulp down the sobs threatening to break out of my chest, and I quickly pull away from the middle of my dad’s shirt where my cheek has been pressed into a button and my nose has been filled with his scent, and I don’t look up to meet their eyes, and I don’t say goodbye and I don’t say I love you because if I say anything at all I will turn into a puddle of tears at the bottom of the stairs. So instead I grasp the banister, and I run up the stairs, and at each landing I avert my eyes from the window because I don’t want to see them walking away and leaving me. My brother is different. He goes outside and watches them get into our silver station wagon and drive away.
The very first time they left me at school, I watched them drive away, and I will never repeat that mistake again. If I leave them first, instead of them leaving me, I can run to my dorm and surround myself with my peers who will distract my homesick heart just long enough that I won’t have to feel the very worst part of this unbearable estrangement.
This scene repeats itself every third Sunday because we’re allowed to go home only every third weekend. It repeats after fall break and winter break and spring break and at the start of every school year for first grade and second grade and third grade and fifth grade. This is why they are too many to count.
“Do you know why you have to be in boarding?” Our housemother asks us. We are sitting around her lounge in our pajamas and bathrobes for the evening devotional before bed. We are six and seven, eight and nine. We are little girls. Little girls who should be at home, with our real mothers brushing our hair and tucking us in.
One of the girls answers. “Because our parents are missionaries.”
“Yes,” our housemother replies. “Because your parents are doing important work for God, and if you were with them, you would only get in the way.”
These words rang so true I didn’t even flinch. They were already my internal truth, though no one had ever spoken them before. I forgot about them entirely until many years later when they crashed into me like a storm surge. Finally being able to recount this story broke the dam I had built inside my chest, and the tears I had never let myself cry back then began to pour out, and they haven’t stopped since.
Those thousand goodbyes were more than just goodbyes. They were reinforcers of the truth that my parents loved me, but not enough. That they loved God more, that God was more important than their own children, and that they were willing to sacrifice us like Isaac on Abraham’s altar to prove it.
Except God never said, “Just kidding,” to my parents. Unlike Abraham, they actually went through with it.
So perhaps all my goodbyes are laced with the residue of this internalized message. I am not enough. I’m not loved enough, good enough, pretty enough, strong enough.
Seeking the feeling of being enough, I fell into a relationship with someone I never should have been with. But he adored me. Called me his queen, his princess. He couldn’t get enough of me.
He didn’t understand me, he didn’t respect me, but at least he always wanted me.
It took me three years before all the arguments and the lack of emotional connection and the despair of having no future with him trumped my need to be adored. When I got so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t handle it anymore, I called it off. I had to break up with him twice before he accepted my decision. I paced my apartment hyperventilating with my sobs. I writhed on my bed, clutching my phone, using every ounce of willpower not to call him and take it all back. It felt like I had cut off all my limbs.
I was told my pain was so great because I must have really loved him. But I never believed that. Now I believe it was the triggering of old trauma that unraveled me so completely. I had attached myself to someone in an attempt to feel better about myself, and now the detaching was tearing at all my scars, opening everything up, leaving me bleeding and utterly wretched.
At 25, it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life.
The year before that, we had sat together on the edge of my bed, and he was so happy to see me, but all I wanted was for him to leave. It was so late. I was so tired and jetlagged. I had just returned from a week in Pakistan that had felt like a month on a different planet in a different time. My head felt like a balloon full of swirling dust. There was no room for him among the cobwebs that cluttered my heart. I had just said the proper goodbye to my home and my country and my childhood, the one I had never said at fourteen when all that had been taken away from me. And now I felt empty and untethered, floating off into space, the place below my feet, my bed and my boyfriend, like familiar images from a whispering dream calling me to come back down to earth.
I went to work the next day in a trance. Everything I touched seemed unreal, as if my heels would sink through the floor and my body melt through the chair, and the sound of my own voice echoing somewhere far away, like the distant call of someone trying to wake me.
It was jet lag, of course, but so much more. After 11 years away, returning to Pakistan finally fulfilled my adolescent dream. How many times in school had I stared out the window, daydreaming about sitting on an airplane that was landing in Islamabad, peering out the window for the first glimpse of my long-lost country? My grand homecoming. The return that was 11 years too late.
When we said goodbye back then, it was a “see you later” kind of goodbye, not a forever goodbye. I had only packed a backpack with a few essentials. I remember checking my wardrobe one last time to make sure there was nothing else I needed to take with me. I caught sight of the birthday card I had bought early for my brother because it was so perfect for him. I wondered if I should take it, but his birthday wasn’t until the beginning of October, and we were supposed to be home by the end of the summer. So I closed the wardrobe door and left it.
I didn’t say goodbye to the house or anything else because I would be back in a few months. I just crouched down and hugged my dog and told him I’d see him soon, and then we got in the car and went to the airport and never came back.
The three months we were supposed to be in America became a year, and then that year became forever. My dad went back home to pack up the house and ship our stuff to the States. We left the cat with my aunt. The dog had already been killed. My dad took a photo of the rose bed where he was buried. He also took pictures of the house, the rooms empty now with the furniture sold off, my aunt and her roommate in the background packing our things into boxes. Every time I flip through the family photo albums, I scurry past these. Like old photos of dead people in their coffins. I don’t want to see it dead. I only want to see it how I remember it. As my home. Alive.
My parents promised us that someday we would go back as a family. It only took 11 years. I was 13 when I hugged my dog goodbye and 24 when I sat in a van outside the gate of our old house and tried to recognize it, tried to honor the grave on the other side of those white washed walls. But the bougainvillea had been stripped to make way for a third floor, and the side yard with the rose bed had been dug up and replaced with a new extension to the house, and my dog’s bones were no longer feeding the roses but now lay somewhere crushed beneath the weight of cold, unrecognizable concrete.
I mourned the desecration of his grave. He was my friend. When all the world seemed against me, when I was sad and alone, when I was hurt, when strange new hormones were raging, when there was no one to talk to, I would talk to him. I would put my arms around his neck and whisper to him the secret things in my heart. I chose to believe he understood me because I wanted so badly to be understood. And like all good dogs, he listened.
We bonded especially over our mutual grief, the loss of our beloved home. Before moving to this house, our home had been an oasis in a desert, a compound shaded from the surrounding town by a protective wall, filled like a vase with flowers and trees bursting with color against the dusty road where it sat. This was the home I had come home to every third weekend and every winter break, my sanctuary, my refuge. Leaving it tore a hole in my heart. Here I had been free. Here I was a girl who had climbed trees and learned to ride her bike without training wheels. A girl who played in the dirt and hunted for treasures in the garbage pits. A girl with skinned knees and calloused hands and elephant thorns in her bike tires, dizzy from spinning in circles on the swing.
When we left, I not only lost the trees and the flowers and the space to ride a bike but also my girlhood. We moved as I moved from a girl of 11 to a woman of 12. In the new house in the city, there were no trees to climb and no space to ride a bike, and even if there had been, I would have been forbidden from it. Too old now to be a girl, I had to behave like a woman so the Pakistanis pressed up all around us wouldn’t be offended. From their rooftops and verandahs, they could see over our wall and watch everything we did in our small yard. I had no more privacy and no more freedom. I stayed inside and read books and acted out because my body yearned to be free.
I felt the sadness in my dog too. He no longer had a whole compound to roam. He could only run, frustrated, back and forth from one wall of the yard to the other. No wonder he escaped and got hit by a car. He had only been looking for his freedom.
No one else in the family seemed to miss our home, so we would hug, my dog and me, and his dirty white fur would absorb my tears, and I would see in the well of his deep brown eyes an understanding of my pain because he felt the grief of our lost home too.
I told you these goodbyes were too hard to count. I’ve lost track again and gone back and forth in time, the losses crisscrossing as they collect, one on top of the other under the bell jar, all connected, all crying to be accounted for. I have cried for each of them. Perhaps this is their funeral. A dirge at last for the lost things, the unplanned goodbyes, the unspoken sadnesses. Goodbye to the goodbyes, for now. I’m sure I will see them again.
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