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

Bottling a widow's tears

"No more 'seeing' holidays, the next holiday has to be a 'doing' one," Shekhar had said even as he booked a trip to Greece for the family in March. Truth be told, he had tried to book a chalet in the Alps but had left it too late, so here we were on our way to Athens. "The boys have never seen real snow..." he said over and over again during the course of our trip. "I really want them to see what it's like in the snow..." The next holiday didn't happen.

In Greece we saw history, more history and yet more history. It's hard not to...it resides everywhere - under each step you take, in the walls, in the words, sights, smells and sounds.

While preparing for the trip, I had read about the Benaki Museum somewhere. One man's passion for collection translated into room upon room of artifacts. In a small area on one of the floors were bottles that had been used to collect widows' tears. In ancient Greece, tradition and superstition demanded that the tears of the widow be collected in lachrymatories so that they did not fall on the body of the deceased. The tears were later poured upon the grave. The Victorians embraced the tradition in their fascination with death, as an elaborate ritual of grief. During Victorian funerals, men and women shed tears for the deceased and collected them in cigar shaped vials. The story goes that these vials had special stoppers. When the tears finally evaporated, the mourning would be complete.

The idea piqued my curiosity. The measured approach to grief was strangely fascinating. I wanted to see for myself how one could pour grief into a receptacle, contain it, limit it...to a vase or bottle the size of a perfume...50 ml of grief? What if it overflowed? Would the widow or mourner recalibrate their grief to fit the vessel? Or, would there be many bottles, each signifying the ebbing of pain and receding grief? I still haven't understood the reasoning behind the tradition but my single pointed focus on it seems prescient. But then everything seems prescient in retrospect...

When we flew back carrying a heavier load of baggage than we left with, some of it intangible in the form of memories...Shekhar reiterated his desire to show the boys snow. We came home, unpacked and settled our tired bodies into our beds that night. It doesn't make a sound when it falls and it fell all night...snow. We woke to a white world. He couldn't take the boys to the snow, so the snow came to him. It wasn't the first time God had really listened to Shekhar...

***

I measure every grief I meet

With analytic eyes;

I wonder if it weighs like mine,

or has an easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long,

Or did it just begin?

I could not tell the date of mine,

It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,

And if they have to try,

And whether, could they choose between,

They would not rather die.

I wonder if when years have piled --

Some thousands--on the cause

Of early hurt, if such a lapse

Could give them any pause;

Or would they go on aching still

Through centuries above,

Enlightened to a larger pain

By contrast with the love...

From poem 561 by Emily Dickinson

Empty Silences

The rest is silence - Hamlet's last words, in the eponymous play written by Shakespeare, hold many meanings. In death, there is rest and silence...after death, for those left behind there is only silence.

Over the past year, this silence has grown to a deafening crescendo. No more phone calls at odd times of the day, no more conversations as we wait to fall asleep, no more recounting of the day's travails...no more sound. It still amazes me how quickly it became quiet. In just an instant all that was left was silence. We live around the silence, it is a physical presence in our lives now...just like the emptiness.

The void left behind by the loss of the physical being that was Shekhar is palpable. It is in the empty cupboard spaces, in the missing hugs and touches, in the vacant chair at the dinner table, in the driver's seat of the car and our lives. Still we believe that he's around us - alive in the silence and the emptiness - in our dreams, thoughts and words.

Some day the empty silences will become a habit. As humans that is what we do, given long enough we become accustomed to things that are unbearable. Till then, in the quiet emptiness, we will live with and bear the echoes of silence.

***

Let me come to be still in your silence

And let me talk to you with your silence

That is bright as a lamp

Simple, as a ring

You are like the night

With its stillness and constellations

Your silence is that of a star

As remote and candid...

From I like for you to be still by Pablo Neruda

Always dressed

I was recently reading some first person accounts of people whose lives had been ravaged by conflict and one particular story just stayed with me. The woman said, and I paraphrase, "We are always dressed because we don't know when we might have to leave." She spoke of sleeping with her shoes on and the uncertainty of her life resonated with me at a level I didn't expect.

In this past year, metaphorically speaking, I too have been "always dressed", living at an unsustainable level of alertness that is now beginning to tell on me. When one has an end in sight or when it is a known or familiar transition, the mind, body and emotion synergize and deal with the uncertainty knowing it is just a phase. Quite like the marathon runner sprinting towards the finish line after consistently putting rubber to tarmac, step after step after step, overcoming all physical and mental resistance. The uncertainty that the boys and I deal with every moment of every day is seemingly endless, the marathon started a little over a year ago and we're still running - step after step after step - with little idea of direction or meaning.

I know and understand, at an intellectual level, that things will change, this too shall pass and maybe we will settle into an uncertain certainty. In every other way, I have been beaten into exhaustion, surrender and apathy because I've realized - what is the point if you're "always dressed" when there's no where to go?

***

Due to cost cutting directives, the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off.

-Joke sent by SMS

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave..."

God's Acres, obituaries and remembrances have always held a fascination for me. I believe they define the transcience of our lives and give weight to the present. Some obituaries are exemplary biographies of lives that inspire you to live larger, dream bigger and love more. Remembrances, however, are a different kettle of fish. The time lag between the passing and the remembering gives me pause. How long before the grief lightens...one year, two...ten years...a lifetime...never?

On a windy, overcast day in January a few years ago, I dragged a friend to visit some of the oldest cemeteries of Hong Kong. Carved cheek-by-jowl into a hillside in Happy Valley, these cemeteries hold the dead of three religious denominations. Ornate headstones, cairns, unmarked graves and a columbarium are visited by the living - to pay respect, to talk to loved ones, to find a lost relative and some like me, out of a morbid curiosity to see the place of rest of the hundreds that marked the history of the city.

Cut to after Shekhar's death. On a blustery and wet English morning, as our older son and I walked past a church cemetery in St Albans he said, "I am so glad Dad isn't buried. If he was, I'd always feel a pull to come back to see him. At least this way he is free, not lying in the ground somewhere." I was surprised by the insight and wisdom that lay behind his observation. I couldn't agree with him more because although it was extremely painful to consign Shekhar's physical body to flames, it was an essential step towards letting go at both an emotional and spiritual level. I cannot say when we will get there or if we ever will but I do know a semblance of peace from knowing that he is not bound to a small piece of earth...we can talk to him anywhere, anytime and he can listen.

***

"Never say of anything, "I have lost it," but "I have returned it." Is your child dead? It is returned. Is your wife dead? She is returned. "But he who took it away is a bad man." What difference is it to you who the giver assigns to take it back? While he gives it to you to possess, take care of it, but don't view it as your own..."

Epictetus, in the Enchiridion

Of ordinary days and milestones

It was the date when Columbine happened, it was the date 168 people died in a plane crash, it was Hitler's birthday, the anniversary of the day 76 perished in a fire in Waco, Texas, the date of the Oklahama City bombing...it was also just an ordinary day which some celebrated and others mourned.

Joan Didion in "The Year of Magical Thinking", her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writes about life changing in an instant on an ordinary day.

It was an ordinary day for us too. Typical English weather - a light drizzle from a murky sky. Saturday. The weekend. The boys didn't want to have their hair cut so he went to the barber alone. He was being teased at work for letting his hair grow 'Einstein-ian'. I had my own agenda; a glass shelf that had broken during our last move had to be replaced. On that ordinary day, we did ordinary things.

That night, events happened and our lives were forever divided into a before and after. The day marked, here on forward, to be mourned.

When it had just happened, I kept saying everyone should know when they are going to die. After all, it is the only certainty in life. That way we would live more meaningfully and the ones we would leave behind would be better prepared for this eventuality. Or so I thought at the time. But having carried death on my shoulder for the past year, I have realized that it is too heavy a burden. That is why we relegate the certainty of death to the corner of our minds, living each day with the hubris of time eternal.

About the time of death, our scriptures say :

Tith vaar na jogi jaane

Rut maah na koi

Jo karta shrishti ko saaje

Aape jaane soi

Which roughly translates to:

Even the yogi does not know the date or day

No one knows the season or month

The one who made the world

Only He knows

Only He knows and this was the day He chose. So here we stand at another series of milestones - this was the day he died, this was the day he was cremated, this was the day his ashes were immersed in the Southern confluence...the days, dates, milestones pile up and I wonder why we mark them. Do we think of him more on these days and less on the others?

Actually, it is not the remembering that marks the day but the reality. On those other days it is easier to fool oneself into thinking it never happened...to pretend that it is just an ordinary day.