My uncle passed away yesterday morning. He had cancer and he was suffering greatly, and everyone around him was suffering as well. I always find it a good thing when death ends suffering instead of allowing it to go on for months or years — it’s avoiding the inevitable at a very high price.

There is a cloud of sadness hovering over my father’s head now. I can’t imagine how it feels like to lose a sibling. Does it feel like you lost a piece of you — what piece? Does it feel like you are finished and cannot go on? Does it feel like you’ve become a barren tree? I don’t know. I guess it depends how close you were to that sibling during their life.

Upon hearing the news, my initial reaction was complete disconnection. I tend to distance myself like that and treat death as a fact instead of being emotional about it. I suppose it’s a tactic for handling the situation, but it’s definitely aided by the fact that I wasn’t particularly close to my late uncle.

When I went to my late uncle’s house, where my cousins were receiving condolences, I felt my heart shrink as I climbed the narrow stairs. There was something overwhelmingly morbid about the yellowness of the stairs and the distant Quranic recitation coming down from the living room. I had to remove my bright red nail polish before visiting, because my mother said it would be insensitive to keep it on and go to a “condolences house.”

The trip up the stairs was historic, I hadn’t gone up these stairs for five years. My last memory of the staircase and the Quranic verses traveling downwards, the mumblings of dark women clad in black, the smell of death and coffee, was when I went up the same stairs to say goodbye to my late aunt. She was something else, what I felt for her then was on a whole different level from what I felt yesterday — and understandably so. The physical settings, however, did not change a bit.

It was heartbreaking to sit in the living room with the women, my cousins and other relatives, and not be able to truly share their sorrow. I felt sad because they were sad, and when one of them broke out in muffled tears my heart jumped out to soothe her pain. I wanted to tell them it was not the end of the world, but I knew that to them it seemed a lot like it. I couldn’t help feeling helplessly insensitive and cruel for thinking I could argue them out of their sadness.

Sitting there on a gray plastic chair in one corner of the room, I tried my best to avoid eye contact. Women came and kissed my cheeks and asked me if I was “Khalid’s daughter,” and I said yes. I didn’t know any of them and they must have sensed how lost I was when I flashed smiles at them, so they introduced themselves by their men (I am X’s wife, X’s mother). I felt incredibly small. I didn’t know any of them and yet they knew me (or my father), and they were family. How do you justify that to yourself, not knowing your own family?

Next to me was sitting an ancient woman in a traditional black velvet dress, with a crooked cane next to her and a number of green tattoos on her face. Her name was Um Abdullah, and she liked coffee. Her face was so wrinkled and her back arched and she couldn’t walk on her own, but she asked for her cup of coffee to be extra full and sat there sipping it like a queen.

The whole affair looked almost identical to my late aunt’s departure. There were less women but the procedures were the same. Coffee offered, dates, lunch and parts of the Quran. Very few women bothered to read Quran, most opted for sitting around and chatting the social obligation away. They talked about their husbands, upcoming family marriages, food… mundane subjects in the presence of death.

I tried to conjure up memories involving my late uncle. I thought if I could remember sweet things he did for me or parts of his character I would be better able to relate to his death. By knowing what was no longer there, I might feel bad and maybe shed a few tears and fit in where I was. All I could remember was his tall and strong build, his gray hair, and his playing zahar with my dad in Samara. Then someone started crying, so I wiped my tears away. I had a headache by then because I had been thinking too hard.

It’s eerie that the night before last I had a dream that my late aunt was visiting my late uncle. I don’t remember the details of the dream but it was disturbing and I woke up feeling uneasy. It was weird but I attributed it to my having discussed my uncle’s situation with someone that day. A day later, he died and the dream came true.

It’s this sea of mixed feelings that’s confusing me. I am working normally, going to school and going about my daily business normally when my uncle has just died. I go to offer my condolences and I cannot even cry, and all I can think of is my late aunt. There is a huge divide between what I should be feeling and doing and what I am actually feeling and doing. It’s uncomfortable feeling inexplicably harsh and aloof.