Two organisms, one boat

When my father asked me if she would be okay, I said yes - because really, there was nothing else to say. Because I could intuit that he wasn’t so much as asking for medical updates, as he was a reassurance of faith, our faith, that she would be okay. That she would sit up from that bed, any day now, and would pull out the long transparent tubes that now sustained her breath. Her voice would be croaky at first, hoarse from the months of unuse, and then she would try again, and ask for water, which I would rush to bring to her, and after she’d had a sip or two, she would look up at us both, like no time had passed, and say, “mes chéris,” in her usual way, smiling with that bright efficacy to which we were once accustomed, and hold us tight.

But this was fantasy because she’d been in that bed for months now, because the doctors who used to say, “any day now,” with the confidence of gods now avoided our eyes and gave the tight-lipped smile people who weren’t sure how to talk about a tragedy did, and this was a tragedy - that my mother, 45 years of age, with bouncy curls, a wide smile, and skin that used to glow with the vibrancy of the sun, should be lying down here, pale, almost blue, breathing with big ugly machines that creaked on every inhalation.

I am 17 years old, I’ve had friends who’ve suffered tragedies - an aunt dying from an accident, a parent who battled with cancer, and I know from their experience that if my mother were to die, it would be an enormous tragedy, like a loss that I would never fully recover from - monumental, and life-defining. I know this theoretically as I know it deep in my bones, but what I’m more afraid of is that if she were to die now, I would lose my father too. It won’t be long, the next day, two weeks, two months, maybe six at best, and he would be gone too.

In biology class, they explain the concept of symbiosis - two organisms of different species who depend on each other to live. But lately, I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s not so much physical dependence on the other specie for some kind of protection or benefit, as it is about the reliance for identity. Like the symbiont goby fish whose whole identity lies in informing the blind shrimp that predators lurk - take it away from that, and he’d probably survive, but who was it without the identity of protector? How would it navigate this world with no blind shrimp to forewarn?

Who would my father be without my mother? My father still? But I'm not so sure about that, at best he would be a robot, not the cool talking ones, but one of those robot vacuum cleaners that move around the room cleaning until they hit a wall, and then course-correct in the other direction, not that they want to be there, cleaning and loving it, but that the wall had nudged them and they had no choice but to move and clean until their battery dies.

I have this fear that my father had only been my father because he loved my mother so, with any other woman, he might not have tried at all. Perhaps love is not even the right word, as I’m not sure if he fell in love like my friends do - seeing someone in their element, liking them because they were good at football, or they were pretty, or funny, and you wanted to be around them all the time, even though they made your heart flutter and your speech stutter. My parents didn’t fall in love like that, in fact, that version of events would seem so silly to them that I’m not sure they would recognise it at all. 

They’d met when they were twelve, on a boat of all places. Even I still find it hard to comprehend, that two orphans displaced by a war that had razed down their homes and their parents along with it, should serendipitiously find themselves together on the same boat. But there were many orphans on that boat, my mother had once clarified, the only serendipity, if there was any at all, was that she had sat next to my father for days on a small rocky boat with stretches of sea, and sea ahead, with no land in sight. And when they’d finally gotten rescued and found themselves on solid ground, she hadn’t known how to walk the new land without him by her side. 

There was no fluttering heart, if there was, it was purely physiological, and not hormonal. It was as if all those days lumped together at sea - the darkness and unkindness of it, the uncertainty of the journey ahead and the slowness of it, the numbness of children who now had no one but themselves in this world - had merged them together, or perhaps melded their souls, and had their bodies feeling what the other felt, that it was hard to distinguish where my mother stopped and where my father began.

It was a synchronicity they hadn’t learned, but somehow acquired, and perfected over time as they survived numerous refugee camps and hard winters of a strange land. Most times I’d hear my mother say, “Yes, that’s right,” and nod to a question my father had asked but somehow forgotten to voice, and I would say, “Use words for those who don’t speak Elvish, please”, and they’d laugh. I was in middle school before I realised that they perhaps didn’t need words, and they only used them for my benefit.  

When Mother slumped six months ago, we were all together at the bakery, cleaning before we closed for the night. The plan had been to work with them there before I go to Uni the next year. Father had made a joke about something, (as he used to, he was a big jester, and Mother was too) about one of the customers asking for a particular bread type, something, I can’t recall now. I had been looking at Father and laughing, and I think I must have seen Mother slumping on his face before I saw her hit the ground - because his face was frozen midway, his eyes in shock and lifeless like he’d had a mini-stroke even before her own body had registered it.

He’s a shell of the person I used to know now - his typical dad jokes are gone; he spends all hours by her side punctuated only by the nurses' insistence that he take a break, but he wouldn’t leave until I got there. I still go to the bakery and bake bread for some hours because we need the money, and at night I’d take over the shift for him, and while he’s gone, I would lean in and whisper to Mother, “If you can hear me, please come back to us. He’s not doing well without you. You know he won’t survive without you.” Like a plea, and a prayer rolled into one, I would whisper it into her ears, desperate for her to hear me and accept it.

I’m five years older than they were when they lost their parents and were brutally tossed into a raging, stormy world. I have five years on them now, maybe this was evolutionary progress - that they’d given me five more years than they ever got with their parents. And I wasn’t being shoved on a boat bound for a strange land with nothing but a bottle of fresh water and a morsel of bread. They’d given me a great life here, an ordinary safe childhood, which was in itself extraordinary, and they’d made me laugh, which used to amaze me, that people who had suffered so much tragedy should have the ability to be so blasé with life and laugh and laugh till their belly hurt. They’d also worked night and day and built something of their own here - a bakery they were proud of, kneading dough and taking pride in customers loving something they made with their hands. I have inherited that pride, and perhaps all of this is enough.

Around 2 am, like clockwork, my father tapped me - he was back from home, where I knew he barely slept, and I shook my head before he asked as if to say no changes, nothing had changed since the three hours he’d been gone. And he nodded, sat beside me, and took her hand in his, “do you think she will be okay?” he asked, like he always asked, his gaze fixed on her pale face. I nodded, vibrantly, with the confidence of gods, and said, "Yes, of course, she will be", and he gave me his rueful smile, and for a second I thought he believed me, and I convinced myself that this symbiosis, however weak, was safe for today, and today would not be the day I lose them.