BETWEEN 61 AND ZERO
Grief does not begin when someone dies.
Sometimes it begins much earlier—when a strong body becomes weak, when pain replaces conversation, when the people gathered around a hospital bed begin searching one another’s faces for hope.
You grieve while the person is still breathing.
Then you feel guilty for grieving too soon.
So you hope.
On the chilly morning of 5 August 2022, I stood outside a resuscitation room where doctors were trying to bring my father back.
The door was ajar. Through the narrow opening, I could see only his feet. Every electric shock made them bounce from the bed before they fell still again.
I could not see his face.
I could not hold his hand.
I could only watch his feet move and convince myself that movement meant life.
With every shock, hope returned.
With every silence, it broke again.
My father died that morning. But grief kept that small opening in the door from ever closing inside me. A part of me remains in that corridor, still waiting for the next shock to work.
People say time heals. I am not sure it does. Time simply teaches us how to walk while carrying what cannot be healed.
Four years, one month and one day later, on 6 September 2026, grief found me outside another hospital room.
This time, my maternal uncle was inside the oncology ward. The door was closed, but through its glass pane I could see the cardiac monitor.
The number was 61.
He had fought an aggressive cancer bravely. We watched the disease take from him little by little. His strength. His comfort. His days.
It was painful to see him suffer. It was equally painful to look at the people who loved him and see their helplessness. Everyone wanted to take away some part of his pain, but love could do nothing except remain beside him and suffer too.
Still, we hoped.
That is what love does when it has nothing else left to offer.
From behind the glass, I watched the number fluctuate. As long as there was a number, he was still with us. As long as his heart beat, even weakly, there was room for a miracle.
At around 3:02 p.m., the number reached zero.
An alarm sounded.
And it was over.
I stared at the monitor, waiting for the zero to change. I wanted one more heartbeat—not a lifetime, not even another day. Just one beat to tell us that he had not left yet.
But zero remained zero.
In that moment, I did not lose only my uncle.
I lost my father again.
The alarm from the oncology ward became the silence outside the resuscitation room. The green zero became my father’s feet falling still. Four years disappeared, and grief joined both moments together as though they had happened on the same day.
That is the cruelty of grief.
Every new loss wakes the old ones.
It does not replace one sorrow with another. It gathers them. It places them side by side and makes the heart carry all of them at once.
One death I witnessed through an ajar door.
The other through the glass pane of a closed one.
In both moments, I was close enough to see life leaving someone I loved, yet too far away to stop it.
Perhaps grief is made from such small, unbearable details.
A pair of feet.
A green number.
An alarm.
A silence.
And the terrible realization that someone who had always existed in your world is suddenly no longer in it.
Life continues after that. Doors open. Corridors empty. People return home.
But grief comes home with us.
It sits quietly in the places they once occupied. It hides inside old photographs, familiar voices and ordinary memories. Some days it remains silent. On other days, a number on a screen is enough to bring everything back.
Until their final seconds, I hoped for both of them.
Perhaps the deepest sorrow is that a part of me still does.
May Allah forgive my maternal uncle and my father, shower them with His infinite mercy, fill their graves with light, and grant them eternal peace in Jannah.
Aameen.
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