The summer after my mum died, my brother came up with a plan. Rather than mark the first anniversary of her death in London, where we had all lived together, we should take ourselves on the most extravagant holiday possible. Why cry at home, he reasoned, when we could cry on the beach in luxury?
It was June 2014 and I was 20, on summer break from my second year at university. For the previous four years, I had been living with the fear and understanding that my mum’s death was imminent. She had been diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma in 2009 and only given six months to live. Thankfully, a brutal surgery and experimental dose of chemotherapy helped her into remission before the cycle began again: surgery, chemo, recovery, fear.
I spent my teenage years terrified that her death would leave my dad, brother and me alone. I also knew it would come as a relief for her and her battered body after so long fighting. On 2 August 2013, she died, with the three of us by her side.
Grief, in all its chaos and complexity, ensued. I cried so hard I thought I would never stop – and then I did. I returned to university, resenting how everyone around me could carry on with their lives in the midst of my suffering. My brother returned to his training as a doctor in Manchester, trying to help others after he had just watched his mother die. We called our dad every day as he sat in our empty house, sorting through my mum’s belongings, now able to experience her life only through the objects she had left behind.
A summer holiday sounded so normal in the face of this and so fun – it almost seemed wrong. Shouldn’t we be traipsing around in black, soliciting sympathy? Could we mourn while drinking champagne for breakfast? My brother insisted we try.
We got our vaccinations, packed and set off, flying from London to Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The route involved two flights, maxed-out credit cards and a safari – a regular holiday seemed too mundane a tribute to our mum, a woman who would drive on a whim to Manchester to see my brother for lunch and who would always be the last on the dancefloor at any party.
As soon as we arrived, things went wrong. Our luggage was stuck somewhere in Kenya, leaving us looking like lost schoolchildren, wearing beer-branded T-shirts from the hotel gift shop and dirty jeans in the 30C heat. The three of us were hot and frustrated when we met our driver for the long trip to the Serengeti early the next morning.
During our seven-hour journey, I began to panic. I realised, for the first time, that I wasn’t sure how to communicate with my dad – in fact, I wasn’t sure I had ever talked to him properly before. He had always been practical and protective, someone you would call for DIY tips or information on where to find the cheapest supermarket deals. We were close, but not outwardly emotional. Our phone calls were mainly monosyllabic, and we used the word “fine” a lot. I didn’t really know how he was coping with the death of the woman he had loved for more than 30 years – he didn’t say and I felt too afraid to ask. How would we be a family now?
This emotional reckoning made it easy not to notice Abi, our driver, who was polite but seemed to be skirting around an issue that none of us wanted to mention: the absence of our mother. It felt as though he was too scared to ask, and I was too paranoid to bring it up.
We continued the polite chat and stuck to the exciting stuff: encountering hundreds of zebras and wildebeest, a rhino from afar, a handful of hippos and a giant elephant.
On our final day, tired from driving and yet to witness a lion roar, Abi, with his gaze fixed on the road ahead, finally asked the question he had been avoiding: “Where is Mrs Kalia?” My heart leapt in fear. My brother went quiet. My dad calmly responded, telling him that she had passed away the year before. At the airport later, my brother turned to me. “Do you think people think we’re weird?” he asked with his head bowed. “Because it’s just the three of us travelling and we don’t have a mum?”
I remember feeling a strange bittersweetness as I reassured him. Maybe it was weird, three downcast men going on a grief safari, but we had muddled through as a trio. We had laughed at monkeys trying to steal cameras from neighbouring jeeps, we had drunk and reminisced about my mum’s fearless sense of adventure and grace through the pain of her illness, and we had sat in silence knowing we still had each other.
It was devastating not having my mum there. She would have loved to experience the silence of the Serengeti and the chaos of our journey, but at least we could carry on living and honour her memory together. We were still working out our dynamic, but it didn’t feel weird – and we wouldn’t need to travel halfway around the world to find it now. Next summer, we could stay closer to home.
Ammar Kalia is a writer and author of A Person is a Prayer
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