None of us knew we were watching my father live out his last ordinary week. It looked too much like every other week to raise any alarm. My father was an electrician, not the kind with a big shop or a signboard, just a man in the community that people trusted with anything electrical, he fixes a socket that stopped working, a fan that would not turn, wiring that had gone bad inside a wall. Over the years, people simply learned to call him whenever something needed fixing. He never advertised himself, his work did the talking for him and he was very friendly in terms of charging them for his pay.
So when my sister's father-in-law passed away and the family needed the wiring fixed before the burial, it was no surprise that they called my father. Burials in our community are not small events. People always come from near and far for it and there is cooking, arranging if canopies and chairs, light is certainly needed for the night, and everything has to work. My father was called for the fixing and he picked up his old tool bag, the one with a handle he had repaired more times than he had repaired other people's things, and went to make sure the house would be ready for all that activity.
He worked through the day, checking wires, testing sockets, making sure nothing would fail once the crowd arrived. By evening, he came home the way he always did, looking a little tired, dusty, and smelling faintly of tape and hard work, but completely fine. We ate dinner together as a family, just like every other night. Nothing about that evening felt unusual. It was, in every way, an ordinary end to an ordinary day.
On the day of the burial, my father dressed and went with a few other men from our village to pay their respects. That is simply the custom and as an in-law to the deceased, he has to show up, stand with the grieving family, you offer his presence in any way he can no matter how little. There was nothing dramatic about it. It was one more thing on a long list of things he did throughout his life, the kind of day that repeats so often you stop noticing it. He went, stood with the mourners, and came home again.
The next day, he said he was not feeling well. Just tired, he said, with a small headache and a kind of slight stomach pain. The kind of complaint that comes and goes in a house and does not alarm anyone. My mother gave him something some medicine and he ate and lie back on the couch to rest. Life continued around him the way it always did. We never saw it as a big deal.
But by the following day, he did not improve. If anything, he was worse, in a way that made the house grow quiet, the kind of quiet that comes when something feels wrong but nobody wants to say it out loud. We decided to take him to the hospital, still telling ourselves that this was something the doctors would recognize and treat quickly, something that would pass like small illnesses usually do.
At the hospital, there was the usual waiting, the usual questions, the usual slow mix of hope and fear that comes with watching someone you love lie in a bed that is not his own. We took turns sitting with him. We spoke to him in small, ordinary words, the kind you use when you do not want to frighten someone or yourself, words like "you will be fine," "just rest," "we are here." Sometimes we crack little jokes to make him feel better. But the sad news is that he never came back home. He died there, at the hospital, only days after fixing wiring for someone else's grief, only a day after standing quietly beside another family's loss.
I have gone over those days many times in my mind since then, looking for a sign I might have missed, some warning I should have caught, but there was none. The wiring job looked like any other wiring job, the walk to the burial looked like any other walk. Even the headache looked like nothing more than a headache. None of it looked like the start of an ending.
That incident has refused to leave my memory, that the last normal day rarely announces itself. It does not come dressed differently from the days before it. It wears the same face, carries the same small routines, and it is only afterward, looking back with a painful kind of clarity, that you see exactly where the line was drawn, that quiet, unremarkable moment after which nothing was ever normal again.
Sometimes I think about how he spent some of his last working hours making sure light would reach a grieving family through the night of their burial, not knowing that soon after, his own family would be the ones sitting in the dark, trying to find our way through a loss we never saw coming.
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