📍Grief - 📍Healing - 📍Life

I turned 43 yesterday. I didn't want to celebrate. Everyone else in my family did. I have to learn how to celebrate. Here is how I am moving through grief, healing and life, one day at a time.

I met her in the elevator. We were both heading to work. It was a rainy, gloomy day. She asked, “Kemon acho? Aami shunlaam Dadu maragechen?” (How are you? I heard that grandpa passed away).

When you meet your former house help and see her lean forward to offer condolences, you stop to receive it. And share your gratitude in return. Mallika is nearly half my age. She worked in my house more than a year back. She didn’t have to do this. I touched her shoulder and patted her gently. I nodded, smiled and said thank you through it. She continued. She asked me about Maa and how is she coping. I told her that she was with me for a month after Baba’s passing and that she would be back in August. “Come and meet her when you can. She is fond of you,” I suggested. At that moment, I realised, I secretly wanted her to come and visit Maa.

In March, when the condolences poured in, I took the most earnest attempt to acknowledge each and everyone who visited, messaged and called me. I was overwhelmed by the wave of grief and comfort that came with it. People known and unknown reached out with a hand, message, a kind word of comfort telling me that I am not alone. When I met people, I got long hugs and wet eyes. Love, attention and humanity flowed from people who didn’t even know Baba enough. That they felt such deep pain for me was extremely overwhelming. I was struggling to express grief. I was trying hard to receive with humility and gratitude. I could see that their words were coming from deep recesses of lived pain and trauma.

There were also those who couldn’t speak to me. Not a word. If I had cried and sobbed, maybe it would have been easy for them. That I chose to speak about my experience and thoughts in ways unlike a grieving daughter, was a new space. I realised my words were making them uncomfortable. There are so many who have ageing and ailing parents. My experience was taking them closer to the eventuality in their lives. “Thank you for sharing your grief. It reminds us of a juncture that we must all prepare for,” wrote a friend on my timeline. Someone else was reliving grief with me. She wrote, “I know your grief because I lost my mother at the end of last year.” Some had seriously started evaluating their relationships with their parents. “I have lived away from my parents for years now. Reading your note, I realised that I have little time with them. Maybe it’s not too late to connect with them.”

That’s when I decided to stop talking to people and start writing instead. I didn’t want my friends to experience grief earlier than its due date. I wanted to process my personal grief, find my own cadence towards healing and find the maturity to celebrate through this universal phase of life. By the beginning of May, I decided to write Story Heirlooms so I could help people tide over pain and preserve the present. For those who have lost elders and who may in times to come, Story Heirlooms unfolded like my gateway to honour Baba, the greatest storyteller of my life. I released an e-book on his birthday in June and it felt like a birthday gift. The book instantly sparked interest in people who had experienced loss or reclaim the loss of familial connections. Some readers sent in their early reviews and I realised that grief makes us human.

Grief brings people together. It helps us build bridges, slow down, dwell, linger, seek rest, healing and peace. Healing follows grief. It comes through people, objects, media and life. When you seek, the universe finds ways to bring it to you. Just like how I discovered Brianna Weist’s book “This Is How You Heal” in the airport. I was in Hyderabad. I was returning after an 8-hour workshop with 120 teachers. At that time, this was the steepest and toughest mountain I could have climbed. I didn’t have the will, neither in my body nor my mind to step out of my story and step into the stories that I would tell or hope to inspire in the teachers. That I survived the day was a miracle. As I walked through the airport, my mind was buzzing. I am carrying scars of loss, how do I heal? It is not about ‘work’, instead it was about ‘life’. The more I dwelled in my pain, I realised I was away from the spirit that people saw in me. That my most ‘authentic’ part of me was scarred felt like an aberration that I had to salvage. I had no intention to read, or buy a book. I discovered the book almost casually as I walked towards my gate. I believe the universe put the book for me there. When I shared the book on my Instagram stories, my inbox buzzed with friends asking more about the book. I realised, we are all trying to heal.

3 days later, I wrote to Natasha to sign up for Ochre Sky Workshops. In my email I wrote:

“I lost my father last month. His passing has been one of the most transformational phases of my life, something that I am trying to understand at the moment. My grief is not allowing me to sink, instead it is filling me with immense strength and buoyancy.

The gift of storytelling was his legacy to me. A gifted storyteller himself, he raised me with a strong belief that a story can change the teller, another human being and the world. What I am today is all for him. On June 11th, he would have turned 73 and I want to spend the month writing about him and honouring his story.”

Natasha replied by saying it would be an ‘honour’ to have me in their writing cohort, “For your trust and your resolve to transform grief into molten gold that will fill the cracks and make us whole again.”

Just like my small encounter with Mallika in the elevator, the finding of a book on healing, signing up for a memoir writing workshop, I paused to contemplate with what do I want to do with my words? The sound of my spoken word was different now, I was working on crafting a new voice. There was no use in fighting the change that was happening within. Isn’t that what healing is all about.

The question was, what do I do with my words? The ones I write on paper? Do I write privately? Do I publish them publicly? I didn’t want to overwhelm readers with my misery, grief and loss. After all, how long can I expect people to lean forward and experience pain with me all over again? And again? I didn’t want to be seen as manipulating my grief for readership. Instead, I decided to find solid reasons to write. First, I would write for myself. Even if no one reads, or cares to read, I would write to feel what I feel. Second, I would write to honour the becoming of me. Baba’s passing is a big phase in my life. He prepared me for it. I am meant to change. Third, I will follow the mantra I teach, “Tell your story, you never know who needs it.”

I set up my Substack soon after that. I wrote about my Imperfect Grief as the debut post. As a new reader on the platform, I soon realised that I was following traces of grief. I found a sisterhood of grief in beautiful essays written by Sanobar, Savvy, Manisha, Alaknanda, Doel and others. Do women process grief differently than men? Why do I find only women and their stories? This is how we heal. I realise my privilege with words. I write so I can allow the men, my husband, my brother and maybe even my son to heal through reading.

Back in March, as I made my way back to Delhi I wrote to my storyteller’s community asking for stories that heal by telling. I was desperately looking for stories that would help me heal by telling them.

Someone wrote back, “Years, many years ago I had the good fortune to spend a little (very little) time in the presence of a Native American woman whose teaching spanned Cherokee traditions, Buddhism and  what some might have though of as way out New Age consciousness…What I took away and have always held from that brief encounter was the metaphor (paraphrasing here) that the Earth is covered and protected by a great blanket of consciousness… that the blanket has grown thin and worn in places of pain, conflict, etc… and that we can reweave those places… that each thought that we have… that the words that we utter, can be stitches in that reweaving… (the flip side is that thoughts can unravel as well)

So, when you remind us that stories heal… that words heal… that words heal the healer too you are speaking to the very heart of the power of storytelling.”

My oral storyteller friends were generous in bringing to me stories that could heal me by telling. Since March, oral storytelling has been challenging. I haven’t found the courage to tell stories that heal me. I trust, will get there when the time is right.

In the meantime, I have been listening to stories. One morning last month, I tapped to listen to an episode on Ted Talks Daily. Nothing usual for me. I listen to a lot of podcasts during my drives. This was early in the morning. I had just dropped V to school. The topic of the talk drew me in, Lessons from my Father’s Final Days.

This could well be the topic of my own TED Talk someday! Just like the finding of the book in the airport, I realised that this episode was out there just for me. A day earlier, I was speaking to S who is dealing with ageing and ailing parents. Hers, more older and fragile than mine, S said, “I have accepted the impermanence of our lives. Now, we wait.” The words ‘acceptance’ and ‘wait’ were weighing heavily on my mind. It broke my heart. I know what acceptance and wait feels like. I know the steps you take to strengthen your heart. The wait that is slow, heart-wrenching, nerve chilling, helpless, fruitless and unending. It tests every part of you. There are days of despair and panic, like there are days of relief and calm. A part of you is always alert, waiting for the phone to ring, telling you that things are slipping. Suddenly, there is hope, magic, joy and you don’t want to celebrate that.

I know what it feels like to steel yourself as you watch your parent/s slip through your arms. As Laurel Braitman told her story, I could feel my heart going into knots. I was still driving. Home was still 15 mins away. The tears rolled down. I waited at a traffic light, hoping for the lights to stay red as long as it could so I could roll over this wave of emotions. I wept, sobbed and then at a point I let out a loud wail. I pulled over and spent those minutes surrendering to the pain I was feeling inside.

I went back to Baba’s last year in this world. At some point he decided to retrace his steps into his past life. That’s when I realised he was preparing for the end. His meeting with friends, his cousins, visiting his grandfather’s place of work (something I had only heard stories of), where his father lived and died, his first place of work, the jeep that he learnt driving in, the house he and Maa moved into and where I was born. the club where his name still hangs on the wall…he didn’t ask to visit his school. I was amazed at how much he wanted to see! I was worried that he would be disappointed to see the world had changed. The world had changed, there was hardly a semblance with what he preserved in his stories. Parts of it may have metamorphosed entirely. Hoping that you’d meet someone who knew your father who died almost 55 years back is insane! What was he expecting anyway? He was expecting nothing! That’s the truth. I understood it later.

Baba was doing it for himself. He was trying to fill up his senses with all that he had lived through his life. This was his flashback. Baba in his last days showed us how to celebrate one’s own life. Laurel described the things that her father did with them in his last days. She was much younger than me when she lost her father. She didn’t get to say a goodbye. I did. She had a fight. Baba and I wove an illusion that he was ready to return home and we were preparing to fight with life again. Laurel described her life through pain and guilt. She described her weariness. I could feel the weight of her grief and loss. My tears had been waiting to flow out. I was grateful in that moment. I felt human. I was reassured that living with loss is a journey. Living through it is a passage of life.

Laurel spoke about the living memorial she gave her mother. I thought of mine. I have her and her life matters to us. Death and grief make way for healing. I see Maa smile, laugh, step out, meet people, read, stitch and crochet. I see her wear sarees at home once again. She is sleeping long nights after many decades. Her nerve pain has disappeared. She is digesting her food after years. Baba left behind the best for her.

I turned 43 yesterday. I didn’t want this day to come. A day when Baba wouldn’t wish me happy birthday. Maa and Bhai flew in to celebrate a month of birthdays. Mine, then A, then V and then Maa. Sometime in 2021, he started a yearly trend. He, me and V are 30 years apart. That year, all of us reached milestone birthdays. He turned 70, I turned 40 and V reached double digits to cross 10. This year, as V crosses another milestone, Baba didn’t reach his 73rd. My 43 would be incomplete.

Bhai asked yesterday, “Without Baba, how did this birthday feel?”

“Incomplete,” I said.

His would be worse. Baba passed away 3 days after his.

During my parent’s anniversary in May, I framed the last family pictures of us. One sits in our home, another in Jamshedpur. We took another family picture when we went out for dinner that night. The family picture looks vacant now. Maybe that’s why none of us wanted to take another one yesterday.

We have to find our way to celebrate our days again. However vacant or empty they may feel. The path to healing is a long and slow one. It’s the journey that I am in here for.

To you, reading this, thank you for being with me.