Will You Help Me Hold it All?

Grief, joy and some memories from a life-changing friendship

Grief and joy live in the same place. If we cannot let one carve the path, the other has no way to flow through. I know this to be true.

I knew a young woman once, who was courageous and brave. She left her mother, and the country she’d lived in all her life, to try out a new life, closer to a father she’d never really known. A true Woman Who Wanders.

She was the age of my younger sister. I treated her the way I’d want somebody to treat Zaynab. I took her with me to meet all my friends. She came along to family dinners at my uncle’s. When her apartment was feeling cold and lonely she would come and watch Netflix on my sofa. Black Mirror. I wouldn’t watch with her, that show is dark, but I’d let her fall asleep on my sofa and miss the last bus home.

One time she invited me out for dinner at her favorite place. It was a generous offer and she needed a friend to talk to. I was a burned-out corporate slave who really didn’t have the energy for dinner after work, but if it was Zaynab I would have said ‘yes’. We sat at the table in the window to people-watch and the attractive Maths lecturer whose photo we’d seen in the newspaper ended up sitting next to us. Apparently, he’d become known across his campus for filling up lecture halls with maths students and non-maths students alike. We tried to get a picture of him without looking like losers. It was fun. This is the one we managed.

It took effort to show up that evening. It was the right choice. I’ve felt very glad for that choice for many years now.

I was going to Morocco that May, so I took her with me. It was a life-changing trip, for both of us. Then I returned to my corporate chain gang while she continued on to visit family in Spain.

I went to Cape Town to work from the office there and be closer to my family during Ramadan. She stayed longer with her cousins. They were coming to visit, she told me, I’d meet them, but she didn’t want to come back before I was back. I was “the radiant pixie dust person with the golden lenses,” she said, and London was darker unless I was there, across the park.

She’d been invited to go bungee jumping and was feeling “passively excited about life”. I can quote these messages because I wrote them down and saved them. They were the last ones she sent to me.

I returned to London, then I left for Cork, Ireland. Another office, another part of my team. On Tuesday, there was a teambuilding dinner and I got a phone call just before, informing me of her death. She was a few weeks shy of twenty-four.

They buried her, in Spain, later that week, and on the same day, my cousin got married. As her funeral procession was taking place, miles away and across seas, I realised I didn’t follow her on Instagram so I searched her account. It was a thoughtless action, just one of those strange things that grief pushes you to do. One of the options available, in the palm of my hand. I was looking for her, but I found an image of myself. A picture from Morocco, taken and posted without my awareness a few weeks before, and a two-word caption: “The compassionate”. It felt like a hug from beyond.

I ironed my dress for the wedding and I cried. I placed it on a coat hanger, hung it on the wardrobe door, and cried. I lay on the bed, cried some more, curled my hair, stopped crying and put on my makeup.

Downstairs, in a house I’ve known since my earliest childhood, I greeted my family and the guests and I smiled. We took photos and we celebrated. My cousin was a bride and another family was joining together with ours and the afternoon was full of joyful possibilities for the future.

I ate food and I laughed and I danced. I danced and danced. They played the songs of the moment and the songs that we had loved in our childhoods. They played the songs that our parents had loved before that. They played Western pop music, they played South Asian wedding classics, and, best of all, they played Somali music.

My cousin’s husband is Somali and the only child of a woman who does not speak English. To see her dance, with her son and new daughter-in-law transmitted pure joy. Her face was radiant, her smile was wide, her clothing was colourful and her arms were open. They danced to a song called Digtoor, by Rahma Rose.

For me, it will always be the sound of that place, where deep grief and soaring joy meet. I can’t hear it and sit still. My hips jump to the beat, the vocal pierces my chest, tears carve a path if they need to, and then, the corners of my mouth involuntarily stretch apart.

Grief and joy live in the same place. I know this to be true. If we cannot let one move through us the other is stuck.

These are heavy times. For the love of God, let’s cry. Let’s dance. Let’s move it through our God-given bodies so we might soften and crumble and rise.

This is what it is to be alive. All the pain, all the joy. Will you help me hold it all?