Buried today

“Buried Today” is a quiet, deeply personal reflection on the day a son buries his father. Through restrained grief and memory, the writer confronts loss, family duty, and the sudden emptiness left by a man who once seemed permanent — revealing how death alters the living as profoundly as it claims the dead.

5 min readJust now

Not a neighbour. Not a friend whose passing one acknowledges with a muted call and then files away. My father.

There is something indecent about writing the word. It feels abrupt, like the closing of a wooden lid. I had always believed — without daring to examine the belief — that he would live forever . Not immortal in any grand sense, but present. Seated in his chair. Listening. Waiting for the world to pass by and report itself to him in bulletins and static.

I left him young — too young to understand the arithmetic of time. I had barely completed my apprenticeship in being a son when I decided to become a man elsewhere. In my early twenties I went far away, not merely to another city but to another country, as if geography itself could accelerate destiny. I was impatient to make a life. Impatient to prove something undefined.

I did not see him ageing. He was young, 49 years when I left. Ageing happened offstage, in my absence. He never spoke of weakness, never itemised the indignities that time must have delivered quietly to his body. He did not mention financial strain. On the contrary, he would astonish me with acts of generosity that bordered on sacrifice. Once he bought air tickets — costing what must have been seventy-five times his monthly salary — simply to bring me and my growing family home. Four children. Noise and appetite and foreign accents. He wanted to see us together, to confirm with his own eyes that I had built what I had set out to build.

He looked after my mother without reporting to me the details of their ailments. Health was handled locally, privately. He refused to burden me with the slow erosion of their strength. He allowed me the illusion that they were unchanged. He allowed me to inhabit fully my new roles — husband, father — without summoning me back with guilt.

He never interfered with my life. Never inspected my choices like an auditor of minor failures. He watched me the way a man watches weather: attentive, aware that storms and clear skies must both pass. If I strayed, he allowed the road to instruct me. If I succeeded, he accepted it without surprise. His confidence in me was quiet and complete. It was a gift whose value has only now revealed itself, when gratitude has nowhere to go.

My mother stands in a corner of the house. She does not weep theatrically. Her love is no more. Her sorrow is internalised, arranged neatly like folded linen. It has settled into her shoulders, into the measured way she walks from room to room. We were five souls woven tightly for decades. Now one thread has been withdrawn and the fabric slackens.

I open his cupboard or the almirah as they call it in Sri Lanka.

The smell comes first — cedar, old cotton, the faint dryness of garments that have known sunlight and careful hands. His shirts hang in disciplined order. Plain. Functional. No indulgence in colour beyond what necessity allowed. Trousers pressed. Sarongs stacked with care. My fingers pause on the bright ones I once brought from Dubai, purchased in the crowded lanes of Meena Bazaar when I still calculated every dirham. I remember thinking seven hundred dirhams for a radio was extravagant. Yet I bought it.

He had asked for only one thing in all those years: a world radio. He wanted the BBC. All India Radio. Distant voices carried across invisible borders. He wanted the assurance that history was unfolding and that he could overhear it. The black Sony transistor I gave him became his companion. He examined it not as a luxury, but as an instrument of reach. It was not ownership he desired, but connection.

In the cupboard, his white jockeys are folded with the same modest precision. Worn thin, washed repeatedly, preserved without complaint. His life had been pared down to essentials. Not from deprivation alone, though he had known that, but from principle. He believed in lightness. In leaving little trace.

I close the cupboard. Then open it again, as if repetition might yield revelation.

In Sydney I live differently. There is abundance here — space, objects, the ease of acquiring more than one requires. I could have sent him finer shirts, softer fabrics, devices that glow and hum. But he did not want them. He seemed to sense that possessions accumulate weight, that they begin to possess the possessor.

I take his silver-buckled belt, inherited from his father before him. The metal is cool, stubbornly intact. Three generations distilled into a single clasp. I place it in my suitcase with something like reverence. Then I gather his shirts, his sarongs, even his underwear. I lift them to my face, searching for his scent. And there it is — soap, age, a faint medicinal trace. Undeniably his.

For a fleeting second I believe he is in the next room, about to clear his throat, about to adjust the radio dial.

I never told him I loved him.

Not plainly. Not in the way that might have startled him. There was no final declaration, no rehearsed goodbye. I expressed it in the grammar we shared — through giving time, conversations, respectful disagreement, the steady exchange of trust. After I turned twenty, he became less a figure of authority and more a companion. We spoke as men. He trusted my judgement. I leaned on his steadiness.

He was my anchor, though I never used the word.

Now the anchor is gone.

The world continues with an indifference that feels almost cruel. Morning arrives. Traffic resumes. Radios broadcast as they always have.

I stand again before the cupboard, its interior suddenly vast. The life it held has contracted into fabric and metal. Into memory. Into a faint echo of radio static that persists somewhere in the chambers of my mind.

How does one proceed when the quiet centre of one’s life dissolves without ceremony?

I do not know.

I only know that in the way I fold these clothes, in the restraint with which I attempt to live, in the refusal to burden myself with excess, he will endure. Not as apparition or myth, but as discipline. As simplicity. As a man who listened carefully to the world and asked for very little from it.

And yet tonight, in the privacy of my parents bedroom room, I allow myself the question that resists dignity: