My father died last weekend.

Bereavement is such an ugly thing. The brain makes no distinction between golden memories and detritus. So I am emotionally fatigued and lack the capacity to filter anything out with my usual thought process. I have a choice; I can either a) feel everything, which gives me the nauseous shakes; or b) play numb and dumb, pay later. Swerving between the two is giving me vertigo.

After my mother died two years ago, I made the choice to go on mental health medication. I’m extremely grateful to be on meds now, when every emotion could roil through me so much more heedlessly, and cause me so much more pain.

Bereavement plus autism parenting is also what makes the ship of emotions lurch violently. There is no option but to steer ruthlessly back on course. I am accountable to A. That does not change, even if my entire universe has. When I was a kid, though, and my father took us on a boat ride to an offshore island, the captain let us try steering as we headed back to the mainland. He pointed out the lights of the National Stadium and said “Try to stay between those huge light poles.” I could not do it, and went every way but straight. Feels appropriate to the moment.

I no longer have parents, I say flatly to my husband and to R several times a day. They always reply how sorry they are. They are wonderful, and have made sure I eat my vegetables. Everything I say or write makes me remember my parents. When I was about twelve, I was signed up to try to earn an “I Am a Young Botanist” badge from the Singapore Science Centre. Being only sporadically of a scientific bent, I kept putting off doing the projects on the list that would get me the cute, shiny badge. My father got sick of watching me be avoidant, and he used a foam box to compile a collection of edible seeds which I shamelessly displayed at the Science Centre as my own work. I wore the badge too, no guilt there. Still have it.

The truth is, I’ve always loved hanging out where science happens, but I don’t want to do science. I never wanted to handle any dead bugs or frogs or pigs’ eyes. The only thing I have grown successfully is mold. And the math required in all of it makes me panic. But there’s just something special about laboratories and science-y people. I respect them a whole lot, and I definitely learned that by watching my father and his colleagues and fellow environmentalists. Later on, my scientist husband explained to me the “rules” of research, and when I looked back, I could see how my father had followed the code too, and trained younger people to do the same.

I remember a nature hike I took with my father and his Nature Society peeps. It was Hard AF. And he sailed right through it, at peace with muggy heat, pelting rain, wet socks, and constant questions from amateur naturalists. In one humiliating moment, a documentary crew filmed my father dragging me over a fallen tree right after he had climbed over it with ease and agility. Being in rainforests was just a-okay for him. Seeing him in his element was the gift, and it was alright that it wasn’t my element too.

I loved when my father had an experiment to check on at night, and would let me go with him. The quietude of the mostly empty botany department hallways was entrancing to me as a kid. He’d check his plants, record data, and we’d go home. A little peek into his world.

He broke his tendon Achilles on a mountain climb in Malaysia once. Like the badass he was, he climbed back down the mountain, and drove six hours back to Singapore (stick shift no less, so both feet required). He had to have surgery, a two-week hospital stay, and six weeks on crutches. My mother would drive him to his office to collect paperwork, and have me climb the stairs with him to make sure he didn’t fall. He loved the jungles and his work so much. One was an extension of the other.

This next part is a quote from the eulogy I wrote that was read out by my sister right before the cremation:

“He was so intellectually curious, so connected to the natural world, and so rooted in our culture and community, while also being a true global citizen. We are here in Singapore because his career brought him here. And from that starting point, he built us an entire universe and offered us all of it to build our own characters and value judgments…We will each uphold your legacy in the ways that our own lives are called to do.”

I want to add that my own spiritual commitment to disability caregiving stems largely from watching my parents take care of my paternal grandmother. It can be grim sometimes, and we certainly do miss out on a lot of wider world events. But in everything I do to provide a happy, functional world for A, I call on my faith, which has grown more authentic and less normative as I have walked this path. I hold close to my heart that my father once said that my husband and I must surely be free of karmic debt. He could not have given us a higher blessing.

In no way does my own commitment absolve society of its responsibility to step up to support families like mine. But the world is so hateful in ways that isolate us further, and I can only keep doing what I’m doing: feel everything; engage lovingly and consciously with my darlings; and make our home a safe place to land.

That’s not insignificant at all. In the minute lies the universe, as my particle physicist husband is fond of quoting.

And, through understanding that perfect truth, I become more fully my father’s daughter.

Radha.