Anniversary
So many of my recent posts have been in the this-time-last-year vein that I feel like 2005 must have been extraordinarily eventful. It’s probably more that the events hit me so much harder, absorbed my thoughts and emotions so completely, that they’ve left a mark I’ll revisit year after year.
Aasif took this photo of me and Amal the evening of Mumanijan’s funeral. We’re in Mumanijan’s room, which looked strangely bare, having been stripped of the bed and oxygen tanks it no longer needed. I wonder how big Amal’s gotten now.
The thing about Nishat Mumanijan was that she always got it, no matter what “it” was. She never judged you, not ever, and if she didn’t necessarily approve of what you were doing, she made it clear the disapproval didn’t extend to you as a person. She heard the things you said. She heard the things you didn’t say. And she definitely brought everybody together.
More and more people came to visit as she got sicker. For myself, it got to the point where I was spending four days a week in Chicago and only three in Atlanta, consecutive weeks at a time. I remember saying here that I pretty much felt one of the rooms in Naperville was mine, I was in it so much. Other people flew in from all over the country, or drove in from just down state, and we’d sit up and watch movies or have Scrabble competitions or just talk where Mumanijan could hear us and sometimes participate. Amal was a fixture; we loved her. Those are good memories for me. There’s a certain sadness to them, but when I look back, I think more about how we were all there, the entire family, and less about the reason why.
When he dropped me off at the airport the Tuesday after the funeral, Sami Mamujan told me not to stop visiting just because Mumanijan had died. I didn’t plan to, but things were already different. We’d packed up her room, her clothes. She wasn’t there anymore. It actually took me eight months to go back, and even then I had a hard time adjusting to having only one home in Chicago. To seeing the yellow vase in Naperville instead of Wheaton, where it belonged.
In the year that she’s been gone, I can’t even begin to count the number of times I thought, Mumanijan would have understood this. She would have.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.aproposofanything.com/2006/02/12/anniversary/trackback/