Grief

There is no one way to grieve like there is no one way to live.   My tryst with grief has been fairly different from many others.  I wondered why for a while.  I questioned myself about my inability to grieve.  Every time I consoled someone else,  or counselled, I kept checking how I felt about their grieving process and if it did resonate with me.  At a gross level ofcourse all grief is the same.  But the thoughts, manifestations and its impact are different for different people.   But I am so waiting to find someone like me!  So does that make me abnormal ? 

I grew up in a small town far far away from Kolkata where the bulk of the larger family lived.  There were deaths in the family which we got notified through telegrams, which brought a gloom in the house,  but it was a distant event for me. I didn’t know how to process it.  The first death that I came face to face was that of a friend of mine, both of us barely 14 years old.  We both performed together in many occasions and suddenly she was gone.  When I got the news I was stunned.  I didn’t know how to react to it.  A few hours later my father came back from his office and asked me if I would like to go to see her once.  I walked in tentatively through the crowd of shocked adult men standing outside the house, and in the hall of her home where we often practised our dance routines, she was lying there.  I had so many emotions coming over me and through me that I just stood there like a robot.  I had so many questions to ask her, I so wanted to ask her to get up and dance with me.  I thought the sadness that I felt must be infinitely smaller than what her sister and her mother must be feeling, that I had no right to express it.  

Since then,  I have seen many deaths.  Sitting with a mother of an 8 yearsold who was on the ventilator outside the ICU, listening to her tormenting over whether to withdraw life support.  How do I say anything that makes sense?  Visiting my colleague and team member to the hospital every other day as she fought terminal cancer.  Carrying food that she wanted to taste but could hardly eat.  She begged for a few years of life, while the doctors were not sure that is possible.  End of it all, I was sitting there all alone with her after she passed for 2 hours while her husband was doing the formalities.  What do I tell her then?  Watching a friend slowly getting consumed by ALS, leaving behind a six-year-old whom she so doted on.  Four months ago, I watched my mother helplessly struggling to breathe as a never-ending heart failure episode racked her frail body.  How do I ease her pain?  I have had many other loved ones taken away from me and from their loved ones in the five decades of my life. 

But Life is waiting there for me.  I return to my office meetings, or house work or my pending work right after each event. Each religion and society have a set of protocol of grieving, and I know of folks who have various ways of intense grieving moments, often running into months or years in some cases.  Next to them it will seem I do not grieve.  How do I explain that I do?  Perhaps differently. 

I remember the fond times we had together very often.  I feel sorry for the lost opportunities at times and I try to learn from it.  There are moments or things or places that brings them back to me in my mind almost as alive as before, for a fleeting second maybe.   I feel strongly of what their desires would be for me to do and would try to do that.  I realise that life is short and uncertain and that we need to grab every remaining second you have to do what you want to do , to say the “I love you”s,  to check on people you care, to find the moments of joy and laughter.  It almost drives me to celebrate the person as well as life as along as its there with me.