Not waving, but drowning

Elizabeth Kuhbler-Ross theorized that grief is a continuum starting with denial, moving through anger and depression to finally, acceptance. But as anyone who has experienced it first hand will tell you, grief is a Sisyphean struggle. One swings between the stages, starting one day with anger ending with denial or another with acceptance funneling into depression...human nature trumps any effort to sequence or categorize it.

I have been watching the television programmes marking the first anniversary of the carnage in Mumbai on 26/11/2008. The media is speaking to ordinary people, survivors and those who have lost someone close. There is a commonality I have observed...one year on, there is a significant difference between those who have experienced a personal loss and those who have survived or have been mere observers of the Golgotha that was 26/11. There is a wet deadness in the eyes of those who are grieving. No Duchenne smiles, no tolerance for frivolous banter, an emotional distance...

Having met several people who have experienced similar losses in the past year, I have seen the same deadness in their eyes. They use the same words, in the same flat tone. "I look at people laughing and enjoying themselves and I wonder how they do it. I could do it before but I don't remember how. Wonder if I'll ever feel the same or anything, any more..." I feel the numbness they speak of. It is like my soul has disconnected from my physical body. I have become a functioning, living, breathing, eating third party observer...an emotional zombie...

The night Shekhar died, something broke in me. I don't know how to fix it. I have been told that over time the pointedness of the pain will wear off, acceptance will come to stay and resilience will out. But I know that even though the wound may heal, the scar will remain. The damage has been done...time will tell if it is reversible, if at all. In the interim, that person I see swimming in the sea of grief is me and...I am not waving, I am drowning...

***

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning.

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning...

From Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith

A little sob in the spine

I started this blog with an audience of only one in mind, as therapy, an expression of what I could not articulate when I spoke. Why then such a public platform? Why not just stick to the journals I wrote ever since I can remember?

My life has been documented in the banal inanities of everyday living, the small crises that buffet the day...on paper with a fountain pen, in numbered copybooks of all shapes and sizes, marking years, journeys, destinations in Bowdlerized words...who knows who might read them and know the tortured soul I truly am?

I remember Shekhar wanting to read what I wrote. "I'm sure you're writing about me..." he would say. "Everything is not about you," I would reply. He would hover and find reasons to peek over my shoulder as I wrote. Soon after he died, the journals became about him. Every page was a letter to him, a litany of what one would be afraid to say to a person who was still alive. In death there is no privacy, everything is accessible...there is no place to hide, no secrets to keep, no approval to seek, no permission to grant...Communication between the dead and the living is the most honest it can be...but it is not enough. Your words float into the ether. There are no echoes...no responses...no consequences...

Hence the blog - to make oneself visible...to reach out and know that someone, somewhere might be touched, might know your pain, might understand...in a world that is bolting past your stillness, it is a cry to be validated, acknowledged as still living.

Vladimir Nabokov the author of Lolita said, "I don't write to touch hearts. I don't even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is the little sob in the spine of the artist-reader." I find myself agreeing with him, the only difference being - I write because there is a little sob in my spine...it appeared 18 months ago. Shekhar put it there...

***

As soon as one writes one miraculously ignores the current circumstances of one's life, yet our happiness or misery leads us to write in a certain way. When we are happy, our imagination is more dominant. When miserable, the power of memory takes over.

Natalia Ginzburg

Mortmain...

Like most people in love I too had professed that I could not live without the object of my affection. Now he's gone and I am still here. I am surviving, existing without him...life makes liars of us all.

It is eighteen months...everyone says how quickly the time has passed but I know how difficult it has been to get through each moment stretched in grief, in absence, in pain...time is elastic.

In the first few months after Shekhar's death, all I could think of was - what if I die too? That question carried me through the immediate collapse of life as I knew it...I lived with a deadline. I got through each day walking the tightrope between 'if' and 'if only' with an almost manic hold on the only reality I knew and understood. Everything needed to be sorted, organized, consolidated...for the children. Time was an external construct, a limited context. There were no goals, only priorities.

Then at some point around the sixth month, the question turned on its head. What if I live? For a year? For ten? For longer than I had him in my life? The emptiness yawned and consumed both past and present. I decided to live one day at a time but living one day at a time in the shadow of death means living without anticipation, without goals, without meaning, without purpose...without a future.

So since the night I held death in my arms, I have learnt not that life is precious but that when the time comes there is nothing you can do to fight death's cold embrace. Words bounce, tears dry, touch withers...mortmain - the dead hand - grips life. Its hold is so tight that time slows and becomes a fallacy, perspective foreshortens, thought distorts - life and death connect in a visible arc.

Mortality is our mien. We live to die but it is only when death becomes personal do we try to find meaning in life. Till then, death is just a statistic...and numbers don't die.

***

A death-blow is a life-blow to some

Who, till they died, did not alive become;

Who, had they lived, had died, but when

They died, vitality begun.

XLVI, from Part Four: Time and Eternity by Emily Dickinson

Post Script...

A close friend recommended I watch a movie called 'P S I Love You' after Shekhar passed away. "Give it some time before you do because you might find it hard to watch right now," she had said. A few months ago, I serendipitously found a DVD of the film and bought it. I gave it a month or so before I watched it for the first time. I cried all through...then I watched it again yesterday, with subtitles, and cried again.

For those who haven't seen it, the film is about a young widow who receives posthumous letters from her husband through the first year after he dies from a brain tumour. It's a formulaic romantic comedy ending in true Hollywood style with hope, all loose ends tied up and an amazing emotional recovery. The story stops while the going is good with potential for a happily ever after. Unfortunately, real life isn't so easy.

It is 17 months now and frankly I am finding it harder now than I did in the immediate aftermath. It is because both you and the world are forgiving as you go through the upheaval of the first year, there's so much to deal with and get through. It is like the anaesthetic given to you during surgery. While you are under its influence, you just go through the befuddled motions, putting one step after another. Then the effect starts to wear off...Most stories and books on grief stop here or pick up several years later. I have yet to find one that tells you how to get through the second, and by far, the most difficult year when life continues its quotidian onslaught, the world expects recovery and you are only just figuring out that this is a permanent state of affairs, as hope of a miraculous return to life as before begins to fade...there is no escape, no rescue, no reprieve... the unanswered why still remains.

*

We experience such hubris when we are in a relationship. We are made visible by the other, by their touch, their words, their looking at us...bearing witness to our lives. We feel we belong, we have a haven where we are accepted, warts and all. We have someone in our corner, whom we can wake up at 2 a.m. with our fears, uncertainties and doubts...you think it will last a lifetime and sometimes it does, till death do you part. Death did us part, Shekhar and I, and the hubris went with him. The thing about widowhood is, it is not a choice one makes. It happens and suddenly you are left alone and incomplete - one half of something that does not exist any more. Life continues, time elapses, grief persists... It is not a movie, it does not end, one does not get to take it out of the DVD player and put it back in its box...and there is no Post Script that says I Love You.

***

The odour from the flower is gone

Which like thy kisses breathed on me;

The colour from the flower is flown

Which glowed of thee and only thee!

A shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,

it lies on my abandoned breast;

And mocks the heart, which is yet warm,

With cold and silent rest.

I weep--my tears revive it not;

I sigh--it breathes no more on me;

Its mute and uncomplaining lot

Is such as mine should be.

On a dead violet by P B Shelley

***

So take a good look at my face

You'll see my smile looks out of place

If you look closer, it's easy to trace

The tracks of my tears

From 'The tracks of my tears' by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

I have become a prayer

I stopped believing in God the night Shekhar died. I didn't stop praying though. I prayed in the hope that the belief would return. That the faith with which I entrusted my hopes, dreams and wishes to the Unseen One, ever since I could remember, would find its way back to me. I do it involuntarily, like breathing.

One summer holiday, our Aunt came to spend time with us. I was nine. She was horrified that we made the sign of the cross while passing a Church and could recite the Lord's Prayer but not our own. She took it upon herself to rectify this glaring deficit in our character. My sisters and I spent what seemed like a very long, hot summer studying Gurmukhi and learning how to read the Granth Sahib. I am eternally grateful to her because when she left at the end of the season, I had realized prayer had a method, a technique, a power I hadn't experienced till then. I was never alone or afraid as long as I could pray.

Prayer has since got me through good and bad times, rough and smooth, ups and downs and in-betweens. I stopped asking for things in my prayers when I realized nothing I could ever imagine for myself could match what God had planned for me. Little did I know...

So now there is anger, recrimination and prayer. But a strange thing has happened since the night Shekhar went...I pray - in supplication, in surrender, in hope, in gratitude. I ask for help, I ask for strength, I ask for guidance, I ask for support...like always. Only now I don't know if I'm praying to God or Shekhar...his name slips so easily off my lips. The human has mingled with the divine...God now has a face...

***

I sit in silent wonder at all I understand.

I am not actively praying.

I have become a prayer.

Anon.

For Shekhar on his 47th birthday...

Osho said that happiness is experienced when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. With Shekhar in it, I fit my life. From the moment we met, there was a sense that everything fit seamlessly, there was a unity in being that bypassed boundaries. It was right, it was cosmic, it was meant to be...

He was my 'kalyana mitra' - noble friend - which Buddhist tradition defines as one who will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. Since no one can see life totally, you must depend on the one you love to see for you what you cannot see for yourself. Shekhar saw all things with 'logic, clarity and reasoning' unlike my emotional, reactive and intuitive vision. Without him it's like I wear glasses that are mismatched to my sight, there is no perspective or counterbalance.

One of Shekhar's favourite ice-breaking exercises at the start of his training programmes was to get a male trainee with the biggest feet to exchange footwear with a female trainee with the smallest feet...apart from the comic relief there was a deeper lesson of walking in another's shoes. It was something he did with the ease of an old soul, with compassion, without judgement. For the past 16 months I have tried to walk in Shekhar's shoes and as would be obvious, they don't fit either. He was a big man and for a person used to following his footsteps, his shoes are too big to fill.

He was the rock to my water, the shore to my sea. I miss him, I miss who I was with and because of him and as time elapses, I miss me...because without him I really don't know who I am anymore.

Life has a way of folding onto itself, for him it ended on a wet April night. For the boys and me, it hangs on the hooks of his memories. It just doesn't fit anymore. Life without him is tight, too small, shrunken, as if the threads that held it in place have unravelled and been stitched back with no account for size.

Birthdays and death days mark the two ends of what Shekhar called 'the curved straight line' - the circle of life - beginning and ending seamlessly, giving meaning to each other in an eternal karmic cycle. We celebrate one and mourn the other but the truth is if one happens the other is certain. Birth and death give context to each other, without them the interval is meaningless. Shekhar said he loved beginnings, not endings so it is his day of birth, the beginning, that we mark today. For the next however many hours it is the 21st of August across all datelines... Happy Birthday, sweetheart.

***

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

From Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone by W.H. Auden

I have no skin

Some people forget how to smile and laugh. Others suffer from 'survivor's guilt'. Some emanate self pity, bitterness and anger. Somatic retraction expresses the burden of despair and sadness for some, while others just throw themselves into a related cause or their work, relegating it to the realm of the subconscious. There are an evolved few who accept with equanimity and live by what the Indian scriptures propound - detachment. But whichever way you cope - grief is not pretty. We are uncomfortable because of and around it. All that naked unbridled emotion, exposed vulnerability, uncontrolled and tortured suffering without the safety of censure is scary...so we tiptoe around this elephant in the room.

I have learnt that there is nothing right you can say to a grieving person. No words can really make it better. The inner censor takes a back seat in grief and no matter what anyone says the pain is so overwhelming at times that the person who is grieving loses sight of borders - both within and without. Words escape, emotions are like napalm and collateral damage is high.

Words are clever little creatures, aren't they? They slip off tongues, intended to comfort but end up as platitudes. Take the simple question "How are you?" What can one really say in reply? None of the standard answers work. "Time will heal" throws me every time. I live on grief time, it passes differently for me - it expands into painful nanoseconds experienced like the pecks of a bird on living flesh, each moment burdened by memory or what could have or should have been - months and years are too long to consider or put in perspective. "The good die young..." - what does that make me and the boys? "Enough..." - is there a statute of limitations on grief? "It could have been worse" "At least he left you with good memories" "Get a grip..."

I have only recently realized that these words trouble me because of a simple truth - I am not ready to hear them. Some day I will probably look back and know they were true but I am just not there yet. I don't know when I will be...the room is small and I can't seem to be able to get the elephant to leave...

***

I have no skin

Every breath hurts, every memory is a wound

All boundaries have vanished

I stand exposed, fragile and vulnerable

I leak...

From I miss me by JSV

***

" Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it."

Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha