Pappa's day, by our calendar
Our calendar has no leap years, so Pappa's anniversary creeps a little earlier through the English calendar every few years. This year it fell yesterday.
The proper ceremonies were done for him by a priest at the Zoroastrian Centre in London, and I watched on my phone propped against the bread bin, scarf over my hair. At home I did what I know. Fresh oil in the divo (steel thali, nowhere near the curtains, as ever), a jar of white tuberoses, a cup of tea made the way he took it, far too sweet, and the Ashem Vohu and Yatha Ahu Vairyo for him, slowly, the way he taught me when I was six and fidgeting.
He used to say prayers aren't for asking. They're for keeping the line open. So I kept the line open for an hour. Then I drank his tea, because he would have been offended if I'd poured it away.
Writing the names for All Souls
Every October our parish leaves a book at the back of the church for All Souls. You write the names of the people you've lost, and on the evening of the 2nd they're read aloud at the requiem, one by one, while a candle burns on the altar.
Today I wrote my mother's name for the fifth year. My handwriting has got steadier each time. This year I added my old choir director, who taught me to breathe from the belly and never, ever to go flat on a descant.
There's something about seeing her name on a page with a hundred others, in a hundred different hands. Grief is so private, and then for one evening it isn't.
Turkish tea takes about fifteen minutes in the çaydanlık: water boiling below, leaves steeping above. For years I scrolled through those fifteen minutes. Now they belong to dhikr.
La ilaha illallah, on the out-breath and the in-breath, while the steam rises. Nothing dramatic happens. No visions, no whirling. Just the kettle, the window going dark over the Chicago rooftops, and the slow return of the heart to where it was always meant to face.
The masters say remembrance polishes the mirror of the heart. Mine has a lot of fingerprints. Fifteen minutes at a time, then. Tea's ready. Come sit.