On days I don’t write, I am constantly engaged in an inner monologue with myself. I find myself repeating certain words over and over again, under my breath. I don’t write them down, I don’t speak them out but I feel their shapes and textures. I see them and they see me. They float down haphazardly like the snow, landing and lodging themselves with differing wills somewhere deep within my haptic sinews. They become the tension I carry with me in my body, the heaviness of it. Often, they do not belong together. They do not make that much sense either. But I acknowledge them.

They wait breathlessly for the moment when I can finally sit down and say sorry, sorry for making you all wait so long. And I let them rest here, making a little home, lighting one small fire, this one lamp standing tall beside the dark icy street. Something to hang my coat on for now. Before I have to move again.

All this time away feels like holding my breath underwater for a long long time.

When I write, I gasp, I surface.

I breathe.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved words. The stranger they are, the better. I misspell them, mispronounce them. Misread them. But I love them. When I had barely learned to write, I was convinced that I too had every right to make my own words. (No wonder I was bad at spelling.) When my husband catches me misspelling or mispronouncing a word, knowing that my love for reading and writing is only self-professed, I do feel schooled but grateful. (It is his way of expressing his love for language and me.) I try to pronounce them correctly and say the incorrect word by default the second I get comfortable. But it does not change anything about how I feel about words. How I have always felt about them. Like kind mothers, I believe they don’t mind me playing around with them. As long as I can bring my child-like wonder to the game.

I like describing things as I write. I like the feeling of not being rushed into saying something or into voicing out any tender thoughts, not fully formulated, which are so quick to recede when open to immediate contradiction but blossom beautifully when watered and given time. I like the sensation of being able to mull over them. To revisit. To reflect. When I speak, I tumble over silences, nervous, filling them up, making up for emptiness, and all my words come out jumbled. But when I write, I am alone. There is no one here. I write as one would write a letter. I think of you, reader, as being kind. I think of you thinking about this, only in retrospect. I feel I can, with the first snow, gently, in the early morning, leave this letter under your door and walk away, as silent as I came. If you were to catch me as I do, you would find me running away like a madwoman. Laughing and crying. Thrilled that I got to say all this to you without having to deal with the consequences of speaking my truth in the moment.

Most times, that has worked in my favor. But sometimes, it has been a detriment too. I have loved words for the sake of loving them. Playing with words is sort of like playing with fire. It is fine as long as you don’t hold them too close to your skin. The writer risks going close. No wonder most of us only write about the past. Writing while your house is on fire is not everyone’s cup of coffee. You only visit through your mind, in a memory, and even then, never entering but as one would observe from keyholes, looking underneath doors, at the heads and feet of monsters that still proll in those corridors.

But you know what?

Don’t take my word for it.

If you know what I mean.

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“Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.”

Sogyal Rinpoche

The past year has taught me a lot about myself. I realized I am not nice. Not at all. And I don’t have to be, all the time. But I am good at heart. And I mean no harm. I am beginning to find who I am when nothing else holds. How nothing else will hold but truth. How we only do have the present. How there is nothing ordinary about life at all. How there is no one way to grieve.

What all I can survive.

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The weather outside is misleading. But I am a veteran now and won’t be fooled again by the sunlight peltering through the curtain chinks.

I am walking through a dangerous phase in life. More like brisk walking. As one does in the dark, denying the fearful miasma that is only one step behind. And I am not running. That would be admitting I am afraid. And I am afraid. But I won’t say it. I have bundled up all of my feelings into a tight fist, severed it, and placed it deep inside a hole in the wall. And I never look at it.

I can see it from the corner of my eye but never look at it.

I cannot deal with it.

But not a day goes by that I don’t sense it. It is still there, growing, gnawing.

When it gets too much, I try to shed my skin and be someone I am not. I bemoan the fact that I am not like one of those reptiles who hold the ability to do so. It helps me tremendously, or at least I am under the impression that it does, to not feel what is my share to feel in this world. I don’t want to hold on to the layers of what I accumulate every single day. I am beginning to think of myself as a new character every day, every moment. I am not her. All of this is happening to her and not to me. She is not nice, but I can be. Every time I act out, it was her. Not me. I try to dust myself off every single morning. But I can see myself reflected back in the eyes of those around me. I am still her and I am growing like a monstrosity.

I will be honest.

I cannot hear my father’s voice again. See? Even as I write this, tears, ready to well up and drown me, dangerously hover over my eyes. I have learnt to tap my finger when it gets too much, and I need to push it all back in. I am not well, and I know it.

I cannot hear his voice again like I used to. Playing it on repeat. I can look at him in photographs but am too afraid to do it for too long for as he becomes real again so does his absence.

I will never be whole again. I marvel that I am still here, going on like before. How does one live with something like that? Knowing that the person you hold dearer than life can one day live on without you as can you. Can anything be more cruel and kind in nature? I have been spared and yet I am in hell.

So how do you go on? How do you tell your mother to go on?

How words like “Mom, why don’t you read all the books you were planning to read? Why don’t you watch these series on Netflix to while away time?” taste like sand in my mouth even before I have uttered them.

I feel like we are some dumb animals caught inside a trap without a way out. We can shriek all we want but nothing will change. And if nothing will change, nothing matters.

And yet, everything does.

I know now more than ever before the value of the present. How important it is to live your life, in the present, as happily as you can, with the people around you. When I see the mute cherry trees, the grey sky, the sunlight falling on my notebook, people walking their dogs or children or both as the case may be, a routine message on my phone, three mugs to pour the coffee I made into, or even my own hands, I know now how precarious it all is. How everything can disappear at any moment.

All it takes is a heartbeat.

“Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time… It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.”

Leo Buscaglia

And so, with a vengeance, I am trying to embrace life.

With a vengeance, I am trying to be the backbone of my family, suddenly so small, so vulnerable.

I know I am being selfish.

I know I am afraid.

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

Mark Twain

I am someone sitting in a cafe, sipping on coffee like everyone else, but forever ready to brace myself for impact, at the fall of a leaf.

Make yourself familiar with the belief that death is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation. … So that most fearful of all bad things, death, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.

Epicurus

Yet, in all of this madness, there is some grace.

For one, I am beginning to see how everything is one. I am one. Sure, some days I am running forward busily, irritably trying to keep up with time like a river. Some days I am tumultuous and messy like the sea.

Other days I am a lake, still and dark. Waiting for myself to happen.

Other people are me too. I can see we all essentially cry for the same reasons.

There is very little that differentiates us from trees, in matters of life and death that are bigger than us.

One divide did arise though. Not with respect to the trees but with other people. I sense that I am unable to empathize with the day-to-day sorrows and tediousness that plagues people. That is not to say I am above them. I still complain and bemoan over little things that further aggravate my feeling of being generally unwell in the world. No amount of material comfort can make up for it. Beyond a point, it only ever makes me feel restless. But I do sense that I have lost the ability to feel sorrowful for people who are not grieving or in dire situations. I want to scream at them that they are absolutely fine. I want to say you have everything you could ever need to be happy and well. You should be out celebrating. You have your family, well and alive. It is all right there. You don’t need much to be happy really. And when they cannot see it, which is understandable (I was there too), I find myself feeling helpless and enraged.

This is a weakness that I will profess is a work in progress. I am not sure if other people like me feel this too.

Knowing that my time here is finite, makes everything around me either meaningless or even more meaningful. I seem to oscillate between the two from time to time. I do not know which is right. I try to make it the latter but not all days are alike.

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

Edgar Allan Poe

“For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”

Khalil Gibran

What amazes me is that we have built such a humungous world, a huge civilization, and yet there is not enough space in it for death and grieving beyond the initial and necessary ritual of it. As if what comes after, what is invisible to the eye, is not there at all. How can that be? We think it won’t happen? It doesn’t happen? But we all seem to be brisk walking and waltzing our way through these woods of our own making. We deny so much every single day. All of us, trying to run away from something or the other that we know to be true but would hate for it to be true. So, we do the only thing we can do which is to not acknowledge it while knowing it. Most of our troubles seem to stem there.

The past and the fact we cannot change it has a new meaning that it never had before. To know that no one can take the time I spent with my father and our memories away from me. That it happened, that he was my dad, and it can never be undone— even by a God. That is something I hold dearly close.

“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

Helen Keller

I do know that death is peaceful. I know it because I see it everywhere around me, in the falling of leaves, in the setting of the sun, the melting of the snow. And you might say, but they come back. Over and over again.

And I believe, so do we.

We change forms, but we never cease to exist. Because we are all one.

And that is my religion if any.

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

Rabindranath Tagore

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When grieving, nothing really helps. Well, at least not at first.

Medicine/ science/ books/ conversations/ language. Everything fails.

So, you only try to sustain somehow. For what is still left.

The first thing that calmed me was looking at the snow laden trees lining the road, knowing something of my pain and the world beyond this one, standing still, suddenly in such stark relief next to the busy traffic on the road. It seemed like I had been flung all of a sudden to their side of the world. The world had quietened for me all of a sudden and I could see what mattered the most. Almost like the essence of life had been revealed in its absence.

“Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Yet, indoors, it was quite another matter. I remember, in the desperation to clutch at something that could help me breathe, I turned to books on grieving on my way to the airport. Did I read any of them? I tried to read one and failed miserably. It was too soon. I tried to take it too fast, to be someone my mother could rely on. It didn’t work.

So, I wrote. All the way. I wrote. And I cried.

I cried with strangers who had walked through the same path. Everyone around is carrying stories of loss. You would be surprised. It only takes one person to be vulnerable, as I was on that flight, and everyone opened up. My raw pain gave them the strength to look back at their own painful memories and become my source of strength through that time. This change overcame me too as I walked into my home and saw my mother. I became her strength, and she became mine.

With time, when I was ready, music found its way to me.

At first, overwhelmingly, then slowly, I opened up to it.

It happened one day in a Japanese garden. Someone played the piano unexpectedly at a place I had a shared a beautiful memory with my family only a few months before. I felt the music swelling and taking form around me in a way I had never experienced before. I remember listening to the chirruping of a little bird and feeling like it was somehow connected to my father and that he was trying to reach out to me by being present with me in the moment too.

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

Queen Elizabeth II

I thought I would never be able to bear music and yet music has been the biggest gift my dad ever gave me. What moves me when I listen to music is a part of him, I can feel that with every ounce of my being.

As time went on, language came back. Unsurprisingly, poetry came before prose did. Poetry saved me. It really did. My mind had shut itself to all logic and rationality, but poetry was what made its way to my heart. It did not deny me my humanity. It did not deny me my madness, my hesitation, my extremities, my ugliness. It was messy and I could feel at home in it.

Poetry reaffirmed that not being able to let go of grief for it is a part of what you lost is normal. I have tried to trudge my way through it, in a hurry to leap to the other side, but every time I take a few steps it feels like I am leaving him behind in time. It is only now with time that I am beginning to understand that our love, our grief never leaves. We move forward, carrying it close to us. And that too is a form of love.

Grief

by Barbara Crooker

is a river you wade in until you get to the other side./ But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting/ around my ankles, moving downstream/ over the flat rocks. I’m not able to lift a foot,/ move on. Instead, I’m going to stay here/ in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it/ like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms./ I don’t want it to grow up, go to school, get married./ It’s mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me/ in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet/ as a golden Tokay. On the other side,/ there are apples, grapes, walnuts,/ and the rocks are warm from the sun./ But I’m going to stand here,/ growing colder, until every inch/ of my skin is numb. I can’t cross over./ Then you really will be gone.

I slowly learnt that there would be days when grief will overtake my life. And I have to be gentle with myself and those around me when that happens. It is a feeling that demands attention and I have to open up spaces in my life to let it be. It is also an act of love, to be able to look at what hurts and to acknowledge that pain. Something cruel and terrible has happened. The world did not stop because it did. When the man working at the bank crossed off my father’s name from the register offhandedly, I know the amount of strength it took for me to somehow bear that by sparing my mother the sight and then carry on as if nothing had happened.

Grief

by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla/ you must count yourself lucky./ You must offer her what’s left/ of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish/ you must put aside/ and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,/ her eyes moving from the clock/ to the television and back again./ I am not afraid. She has been here before/ and now I can recognize her gait/ as she approaches the house./ Some nights, when I know she’s coming,/ I unlock the door, lie down on my back,/ and count her steps from the street to the porch./ Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,/ tells me to write down/ everyone I have ever known,/ and we separate them between the living and the dead/ so she can pick each name at random./ I play her favorite Willie Nelson album/ because she misses Texas/ but I don’t ask why./ She hums a little,/ the way my brother does when he gardens./ We sit for an hour/ while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,/ crying in the check-out line,/ refusing to eat, refusing to shower,/ all the smoking and all the drinking./ Eventually she puts one of her heavy/ purple arms around me, leans/ her head against mine,/ and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic./ So I tell her,/ things are feeling romantic./ She pulls another name, this time/ from the dead,/ and turns to me in that way that parents do/ so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something./ Romantic? She says,/ reading the name out loud, slowly/ so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel/ wrapping around the bones like new muscle,/ the sound of that person’s body/ and how reckless it is,/ how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

I am a woman clutching with all her might at what I have left. I am trying to fill up all spaces, with words, with material things, with food, with work. And I am burning out profusely, too quickly for my own good. I have become dissociative. I am often in denial of my own feelings. Or lash out. Even writing about this today took a lot but was something I had to do, for good. I wish to somehow find ways to put things between me and the feelings that I find hard to process. And that is okay too, for the time being.

Grief

by Erica Funhouser

I try to impose/ the static beauty/ of what remains,/ like the one utensil/ in an auctioned drawer,/ upon the cluttered truth/ of what is gone,/ not even gone, but going./ I try to keep my mind at noon/ at least as long/ as noon lasts,/ the length of the firehouse whistle,/ the full reverberation/ from the forest,/ the final couplet/ spoken by the flicker/ hammering for grubs/ in fallen hemlock.

I know that it is often hard to understand, the different ways someone finds to mother their own grieving. But they are all valid, as long as you harm no one. As Neil Weis wrote, grief can also be dormant, an entity in itself, frozen, concrete and real, “a horse in the mind named sleep,/ erect in a city where spires spit birds/ and grief holds, never bursts.” There is no right way. If it is happening to you, it is already normal. Do not look for any other experience to validate it, but your own. Grief triggers the deepest recesses of our psyche. It can never be expected to be neat.

And if your grief is neat, that is okay too.

Grief

by Raymond Carver

Woke up early this morning from my bed/ looked far across the Strait to see/ a small boat moving through the choppy water,/ a single running light on. Remembered/ my friend who used to shout/ his dead wife’s name from hilltops/ around Perugia. Who set plate/ for her at his simple table long after/ she was gone. And opened the windows/ so she could have fresh air. Such display/ I found embarrassing. So did his other/ friends. I couldn’t see it./ Not until this morning.

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I hope these poems can do for you what they and many others did for me.

Life finds different ways to teach you how to swim. I am grateful to have some really brave and loving people around me who ensured I didn’t drown.

They have been my oxygen all the time I have been underwater.

I am not ready to come out yet. Maybe I never fully will.

But I can sense this now. I feel myself slowly surfacing.

Not gloriously, oh no.

Grief is bringing with it a lot of other things to the surface, many other not so great pieces of this elaborate puzzle into its fold. But at the heart of it all, I am rediscovering what it means to be myself, as authentic as I can be. I am in the process of taking roots like an oak tree. The process is rhizomatic and crazy. I am forming, steadying myself. It is harder than it sounds. The world has drawn these grids around us for an ideal life and it is anything but ideal when it plays out. As I form, I will cross some of those lines and bleed onto them with my brilliant blues. And that should be okay.

Life is definitely a tragicomedy. And if I have a part to play, I need to make sure that the one who shows up on that stage, no matter what the role, is me.

Because now is the only moment given to us. And this will forever be the only moment to speak our truth.