To Live a Little

Image via Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

“To Live a Little” is a window into the fraught moments leading up to a funeral and the futile attempt to delay grief. As one man struggles with his mind slipping away, his family bears the weight of slowly losing the person they love. With a tenderness born of recognition, Phodiso Modirwa describes the faraway places her dying uncle’s mind would go; both she and her uncle know what it is to be rendered unreachable by the depth of their distress and had found in each other’s suffering a quiet kinship. Originally published in The Shallow Tales Review, this essay tiptoes around a fractured family’s reckoning with loss, the beasts of grief, and lurking mental illness.

— Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights

Inside the old Toyota Tazz, the three of us are attempting forgetfulness while the animal we are in speeds recklessly through the country. From inside here, the sides of the road look like blurry murals of abstract existence, and aren’t we all right now? None of us wants to punctuate this moment with anything so much as a cough, lest it be the thing that names this numbness, this harrowing absence we all don’t want to believe.

Oh! The wailing that came in through my father’s phone last night, like a bird shrieking, caught in a heartless trap. It is the same wailing that saw us piling into this small car, stuffing silence with as much denial as to have death almost second-guess itself. We’re not going to bury anyone; we’re just going to save the bird from the trap, to make sure that the wailing voice was mistaken. I tell myself this because in my mind, my uncle cannot be gone. But if he really is, I need to ask him what he means by that, if perhaps he is afraid and needs me to come with him.

I don’t know why my father is rocking his body from side to side. He is flipping his drawing pencil between his fingers with such dexterity that it is making me anxious. At his command, the pencil can mirror any emotion etched into a face with the precision of a photographer’s work. On