Grief. It sits with you like someone acutely aware of your most vulnerable self and asks you to probe that more deeply. Until it hurts. It asks you to pull at the scab of the wound, sharp and painful. When smiling for a picture or out with loved ones, if you laugh and engage, grief will remind you, it exists, that you need to tend to it. That you are not allowed to be too happy or hopeful. Something terrifying and gut wrenching just happened to you.
I have been levelling with grief these past few months since I lost my father to cardiac arrest in November last year. He would have been 73 on April 9 this year. I was very close to him and I feel his absence profoundly, every single day. I think the finality of death is what is the most difficult to reckon with. The idea that all the memories that you had with that person are now contained to the past. That you have to draw from this finite set and think of a million different ways of how you could have done something differently, or imagine a different outcome of a memory and how that could have been. You will sometimes discover something about that person that you had not known of while they were alive. You have so many questions. You are, perhaps, surprised about this new information and want to ask the person all about it – what it meant, how he felt. His right to imprint his own story on that memory and colour your understanding of it in his own, specific way.
I am also surprised at how grief hits you in completely unexpected circumstances. For me, when I am stretching during the cool down phase of a 40-minute exercise routine, I find myself choking with tears. Out of the blue. Like clockwork. I find myself tearing up in the gym. The place where ordinarily I'd be at my happiest, strongest. For some reason, I remember the loss of my father at the end of my exercise routine.
The first few days back at work were the hardest. There were several occasions when I cried in silence and the persons around me had no idea. My therapist taught me a quick idea to deal with this pain. To look up at the ceiling and count to 10. That sort of visually takes you out of a given situation. But the day I stopped trying to cry, I started to cry less. It all became easier. Why are we so afraid of expressing something so real? No one is going to think less of you for tearing up.
A lot of normal didn't feel normal for very long. Buying clothes, watching movies, meeting people, talking about the inane, gossiping. Feeling ambitious and competitive about work. So many of these things were the core of my personality. But that core had changed fundamentally. Someone hit the reset button. Grief doesn’t just affect you, it changes the person you are. It transforms your very sense of self and what you hold true and what balance means for you.
I am, what they usually describe as "a very type A person". But during this time, I found myself feeling purposeless and sometimes wanting to just fully switch off and do nothing. And the one act of kindness I did was to allow myself that. To have no-agenda days. To not feel bad if I wasn't able to accomplish a single thing on my list. To tell myself that getting through that day itself was my number one thing on the to-do list. Giving myself that grace helped me deal with and perhaps even face what I was really feeling.
Absence registers more deeply than presence. I am now convinced of this. And there are no formulaic ways or therapies or wellness actions or steps to processing grief. Even the seven stages of grief didn't apply to me. I have likely felt 101 stages of grief and more, not counting.
For a very long time, my father’s death collapsed into everything else that was going wrong in life. If something bad happened in a day, the all-encompassing grief surrounding his death would attach to that little bad thing and would conflate into one large feeling of hopelessness and profound sorrow.
Everything in life, large and small, reminded me of him. His shaving cream and toothbrush on the bathroom shelf that I haven't had the courage to throw away till date. The pictures that Google Photos kept throwing up at me on my phone, every few days, unsolicited but tangible reminders of the frailty of this body, of life itself. I would look at pictures at different times in his life and think to myself, he looked much weaker a few years ago than he did closer to when he died. But surely he couldn't have been any better given the absoluteness of death, I argue with myself. I find myself thanking the past for preserving his body for all these years. For allowing him to see life until 72 and for me to be a part of almost half that life. I find myself looking at the mirror and searching for traces of his face. Through me and with that eyebrow or smile or jawline or hair, I want him to live forever. Or at least until I do, to live with me.
I have often (many times unthinkingly) referenced my father's death as the cause for my absence or slowness or general inability to do something. Sometimes I wonder if I use his name too often and in vain. That I shouldn't speak about something so personal to me. Something that perhaps another person will never share with the same intensity. But then, there is no other reason. If I have been slower or less involved or less productive, it has been because a constant presence in my life has become a memory. And somewhere along the way I allowed myself to tell this truth to the world. I did not diminish his memory in doing so. I only conveyed what I was going through then with complete authenticity. If I was to be true to my work, my output, my presence, I would have to acknowledge that something in my source of power had changed. It was important for the other person to know this information.
During the last, almost five months since his death, I have found myself hesitating when thinking about posting a happy picture of myself. Or pictures of a holiday or a pet. What if people thought I had spent the courtesy mourning period and then forgotten all about him. It took a lot of self-talk to convince myself, that I needed to give other people (and myself) more credit than that. The grief of his death and the joy of my life are not binaries. The life of the heart is never lived through binaries. Even on a beach in Goa with the sun on my face and the ocean around me, I was enveloped by the sense of his absence. Of what he would have said or done. What he would have eaten. And I would find myself choking up for no apparent reason. And yet, on Instagram, there's a smiling photo of me. And in that moment, I am all of those things. I am happy and I am sad and I am looking at the future that does not carry him and I am looking at the past that taught me to imagine what his response to this future would be. All of it was what I was feeling. And all of those feelings are valid.
Life creates a timeline, ever so neatly in your head. Before his death and after his death. This takes on a new meaning. Was this the old, unchanged me? Oblivious of what was to come? Or was this the me that was living (and even thriving) in spite of what had happened?
There were a lot of reimagined memories. What would Baba do if he were here? I felt the need to include him in all the new memories I was creating — and find pathways to the old ones that actually happened. Until I was not quite sure, what happened and what was imagined. Either way, so long as his presence was recorded, he was being honoured in some way.
A lot of people will (in a well-meaning way) tell you what to do to deal with pain. Many of those things may help. But it may still not feel like you're fully healed. And why do you have to heal? This loss may set itself in your mind with permanence. And that's okay too. The world is too used to providing quick solutions to everything. Dealing with grief has no solutions. And I am glad it doesn't. Because it needs one to sit through it. Feel it and immerse in it. I have also understood that telling yourself (or others) that you don't want to cry is useless. You will cry, maybe you should cry. And it's okay if you do.
The sorrow I felt in the moment opened myself to compassion and empathy for others. I felt what they felt more deeply, I cared about their problems more. It was as if someone put a bold and underline on the word "feel" in my emotional map. This time also made me realise the wonderful people who surrounded me. Those that reached out with their words and deeds and hugs and food. To them, I will always remain grateful.
There were times when I felt so paralysed that I felt my sense of self and life was over as I knew it. That this feeling had so overtaken me that I wouldn't be able to do anything else. That nothing else really even mattered now that he wasn't alive. That there was such a futility to my existence. And you know what, during those times, those feelings about myself were in fact true. I was just a body for many days. One that did not perform its primary functions in society.
There were many moments in this journey where I felt weak and helpless. Where I felt incapable of lifting myself from the abyss of sorrow, let alone my other loved ones. But that same me found the strength to (maybe after a good night’s sleep or maybe after a few hours alone) move forward and to hold my mother’s and sister’s hands. And I learnt through this that there is a perennial fount of energy and belief and strength that will carry you forward. You don’t have to be strong in death. You can be weak and feel you are powerless and even then, carry on. That, on its own, will be your strength.
Grief is a process. A journey with no real end in sight. But it teaches you many things about yourself along the way. And about how you make associations with people that you care about. And how you carry them. In the palm of your hand. Whether real or imagined. They are still very much there. With you.
shalaka.patil@gmail.com
