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

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