Life has a way of communicating with me through a song, a film, or a book that came into my life at precisely the perfect moment. This isn’t something new to me. But once it gets to the point where it feels like I’m in a film directed by some big shot director, with Ken Jenie and Mar Galo as the music arranger.
My father passed away in November 2021 while my brother was in the middle of a remote woods in central Java training for the infantry of Indonesia’s national army. My closest friends are at home, talking to me and keeping me company before the funeral in the morning. It was 2 am when I heard a car approaching, I went outside and saw blue lights like the ones in a police car. My stomach drops. I knew it was my brother. Still in his army uniform and covered in mud, he walked with a man holding his arm to help him stand. When he saw me he fell on my shoulders and cry hysterically. He walked up to where our dad was being laid down and cried an angry, frustrated, remorseful cry.
A few hours earlier when we just found out that my father passed away mom had asked for help to let him know. Being in the army himself, my father had some of friends that can help us despite we’ve been cut off from communications with my brother for weeks. Apparently, after that, someone picked him up deep into the forest via 2 hours motorcycle ride before continuing another 7 hours car ride home. He didn't bring anything but the clothes on his body. He said he had been asking what happened the entire way home but no one told him until he witnessed for himself that our house had been turned into a funeral home. The next day he buried our father in an army ceremony still wearing his uniform that had been worn out by weeks of intense training.
Weeks later, my brother received his infantry badge. The ceremony was at a beach, my mother attended the exact same ceremony when my father completed his infantry training as well, long before I was born. I remember that one of the reason why my father tried to push for his body to get better was to attend this ceremony. It wasn’t as exciting as other milestones since my brother no longer have someone he can talk to about the experience. I can imagine my brother saving up weeks' worth of details he had hoped to share with someone who had also succeeded to go through it all only to find that it’s just the two of us waiting at the finish line.
After the ceremony, we decided to stop for some seafood before we head home. It was the last seafood I can touch to this day and I’m not sure if I can stomach some seafood ever again. It took quite a while for us to choose what we wanted to have. Usually, my father does this part, he always knows which item is good at which coast. Now it’s just us guessing.
When we finished eating a man walked in and play his guitar. It was a vintage song, Aku Tak Biasa by Alda Rizma. It was the song I kept hearing growing up, I took a glance and saw my mother crying. It was their song since my mom was often left alone for trips. That moment, the heat, the song, everything felt carefully crafted. We were doing something we never did without him for the first time after he was gone. The weather was scorching hot, the way I always remember our mudik trips, the joy of my childhood always happens in this kind of weather. It felt as if someone had written a scene for us to act out and this song is the score. I took it as a sign that the universe is doing him a favor, to let us know that he’s there with us throughout the ceremony, there with us at the coastline seafood stall. The moment felt like a good film, one that’s directed by Kamila Andini maybe, with music by Ken Jenie and Mar Galo.
I felt spiritual. The saying “God is the best director for our story” felt like it has a new, strange weight to it. It’s no longer a cliche some poetic religious person came up with. Maybe my God is an artsy director with a good cultural reference bank. Maybe He’s got a ton of vinyl records, an enormous library, and a massive assembly of criterion collection sets that He will pick and send me during the hardest times. Like the song, like Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, Kogonada’s After Yang, or like Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
I guess this is my life now, keeping a long list of food I can no longer eat, finding messages being spelled out to me through art forms, being broken down and built back up again by the same 3 forms of words, sounds, and moving pictures. It’s been 7 months and I still learn something new every day. About grief, about my father, his artistic knacks, his love for beautiful words, beautiful prayers, his architect handwriting. I know I’ll do just fine, I have music that will play at the right moment, films that will come to me when I need some old man’s guidance, and words spoken to me through the hands of talented writers. I’m going to get married, build my own family, and become a creative director somewhere. I will find ways to figure out life and the future without a father, and everything will be just fine.
