Grief can be a difficult emotion, How do I let the person who’s no more know that I miss them? How do I tell them that they left a gaping hole in my heart, that will exist forever? Grief has ways of making emotions complex, and that becomes bewildering, insidious, and difficult to process in ways that neither I nor anyone else can understand. On its toes, wearing warm socks, on a wooden floor, grief tiptoes in our lives, takes us by surprise, without caution, and jumbles a carefully structured day and the ones that follow. Leaving us vehemently bewildered, grief swiftly creates distractions that we never knew would knock on our doors. Last week back in Delhi, I remember sitting across from my friends and having the most delightful brunch. Our table is decorated with delicacies from the kitchen but across the world. In the middle of taking another bite of my pasta, I could hear my friend suddenly gasping for air, their eyes filling up with tears. My friends and I wait in anticipation, someone is holding their shoulders, and one grabs their hand clenching it, their body enveloped in one of my friend’s arms as she offers them water to drink, and the rest of their body held in a deep frozen state with their phone inches away from falling to the ground. I kept running back and forth, grabbing a glass of water, and napkins in a bundle, clearing out empty plates with grease and gravies. The grief I witnessed that day, reminds me of the day when I didn’t experience mine, and the days that followed where there were feelings avast, but grief stood in a corner alone, grieving.
My journey through grief was of everything but grief. It was a whirlwind of emotions, filled with guilt about the decisions in the past and the ones that followed, it was sadness as deep as I could dive to feel it, but I never learned to swim. What I felt that day reminded me of my grief that was never felt for a person that was never loved enough – my grandfather, my dadu. How do I mourn someone I tried to love, someone who couldn’t love me because mine never sufficed?
I don’t remember my grandfather and I being exceptionally close. I do remember looking at my friends, with their grandparents and even on-screen representations of grandparent-grandchild relationships that always felt fictional. My grandfather, a man of few words, committed to others but his own, reserved, and so beautifully complicated but misconstrued. My childhood memories involve him, my sister and I sitting on the living room couch under a heavy blanket watching CID for hours. I remember him loving paneer and kadhi, sleeping on the bed in the living room, massaging me with coconut oil after a bath, and getting us sweets, condensed milk, and a silver coin for Diwali. The massages got less, the gifts lesser, the visits from his village lesser, and all of that succumbing to absolute oblivion. I also remember him getting bags full of hundreds of mangoes whenever he visited us from the village. We were never able to finish them, half of them ended up rotting. We too, overtime got overripe and eventually rotten. The refrigerator now every summer, feels empty.
Hearing my friend grieve, accompanied by her gasps and sobs that still echo through the room resonates deep within me. An unexplainable feeling of regret washed over me for not feeling sad enough about the demise of my own, gnawing against the walls of my heart, lingering like an unwelcome guest. As I look back, I reminisce about my hunger for his love and a connection I so desperately wanted. Trying to love my grandfather, I found feelings of profound pain that lingered within us, as a family. An agony that haunted us all was that the love, and affection we had to offer each other was waiting at the door constantly ringing the bell waiting to be greeted, hugged, and loved back, but alas. The heart between us was beautiful, shiny, the most perfect shade of cherry red pumping like a heart is supposed to. It was beautiful sitting on a shelf, unhurt, untouched, and unfelt. This conjuncture of feelings made me grapple with emotions dealing with loss seeming larger than I originally presumed. It’s an ugly paradox when you grieve over someone you loved, and the regret is not for the love ungiven (because it wasn’t) but for the love that remained unfulfilled.
As I navigate through this sea of emotions, I’ve learned that loss is a teacher, teaching us about the complexities of love pushing us to the edge, and making us deal with emotions that we thought would persist even when unspoken and unheard. It’s not about mourning loss or loss of love itself. It’s also not about mourning the loss of the person themselves. I don’t think it’s about mourning either, it’s about finding solace that love, in all forms, needs to be felt and understood regardless of how it’s received, or given. Love stands alone, waiting for us to love it, if not understand it. Our comprehension of love is twisted, and what about us? Are we twisted? Oh, don’t get me started.