My dad is from Pakistan. He moved to the United States for school when he was in his early 20s, met my mother — a country girl from Oklahoma — and never went back. I am American, through and through, raised Christian instead of Muslim, raised speaking English instead of Urdu; I’ve never been to Pakistan and I’ve never met my grandmother or my uncle or my cousin. My dad has returned home only a handful of times since I’ve been alive and rarely speaks to his family on the phone.
Unhappily, this communicative ineptitude, this bizarre phone phobia, is something I seem to have inherited.
Last year, my father’s father died. He was an old man, in his 80s, and had lived a full life. His body gave out peacefully as he slept in his chair, I was told. He was something of a legend to me: the soldier, the forest ranger, the stoic, white-haired man in a tunic and horn-rimmed glasses who stared out from the sepia-toned picture in our living room. He was a part of me, and though I’d never met him, I felt an overwhelming, profound ache when I heard of his passing.
News of my grandfather’s death didn’t reach my dad until a month after it had happened. Stay with me for a second and really think about that. My dad’s dad was gone for four whole weeks before he knew anything about it. When the phone call finally came, he was out of town for work and my mom picked up; she ended up having to break the news to my stunned father over the phone. My dad doesn’t talk about Pakistan easily; when I was little, I refused to go to bed until he told me a story from his childhood — my favourite involved him getting chased home by a pack of monkeys. He is the eldest son and he left, he married a white woman and raised his children in the West . . . I know my father’s relationship with his family is strained at best. But I never realised just how disconnected he was until this giant lapse in communication. I always knew I would leave home and go far away. I grew up just outside Detroit, Michigan and after I graduated college, I immediately moved to Chicago. After two years there, I moved to Vancouver where I’ve been for just over a year. I suck at calling home. If a month goes by, my mom will send me a text which usually reads something like “Haven’t heard from you in a while. U alive?” It’s not that I don’t love my family, I think about them often, and yet, something always seems to hold me back when I reach for the phone: it’s too late at night, I’m too tired to talk, it’s been so long since we last talked . . . It’s scary when you find yourself replicating bad habits. I’m all for adventure, exploration and independence, but in pursuing those things, I find myself losing track of the people who make me “me.” It’s a sneaky sort of silence, an isolation that spirals out of control until a phone call to my brother seems like a truly daunting task. Family is family, this is true, but even relationships bound by blood require maintenance. We are young and invincible and bright-eyed, but at some point, we will stumble, we will hurt, and we will fail. So pick up the phone, now. Keep the lines of communication open and remember how much we all really do need each other. ‘Cause no one wants to be in the dark when it counts.
In pursuing adventure, exploration, and independence, I find myself losing track of the people who make me “me.”
