Love and grief

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE

It is three whole years since my husband passed away leaving me without a relationship that sustained and defined me for a lifetime. It was more than marriage — a great friendship and a great camaraderie, an unqualified reassurance.

We had our disputes, our moments of altercation but trust drove away all ill-feeling. It was the emotional connection that mattered. I miss the voice, the step, the presence and the person he was. I miss the mornings spent reading newspapers over a redolent cup of tea, the chirping of birds on the window sill and the rustle of leaves that came with the morning breeze.

Those conversations veered around everything ordinary — the book that we read, the movies watched, the long-overdue visit of an old friend, the child far away, the long tinkle of the phone. Many things were said, while many remained unsaid as we felt there will be other times, other occasions.

It is a matter of wonder how a life spent together seems so brief, so infinitesimal, not just enough to have been with each other. We were greater than our separate selves but now my single self cannot cope with a silence larger than words. Life appears suddenly diminished, except those fugitive memories of happiness. As Emily Dickinson says, In this short life that only lasts an hour/ How much how little is in our power...

No one has ever dealt with death adequately. Some of us, even while grieving at heart, have dealt with it with a semblance of equanimity and some of us have broken down contemplating the enormity of the loss.

In hindsight, moving away from the event, we look at it with a pinch of philosophy. We have been given a particular lease of life. When the lease runs out, we need to exit the world and the sheer absurdity of longing for permanence in an impermanent world when we know that mortality is the stuff of life.

It is the realisation that nothing stops for death, life goes back to being normal, friends and strangers move on in their orbits and we are left alone with the devastating thought that the grief is ours alone. When we mourn the dead, we mourn ourselves as we were and we will never be again.

VS Naipaul said in his essay Strangeness of grief: “We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always fighting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.”

So the living will have to rebuild their lives in the ruins of the loss and carry on with the precious memories that will forever be theirs.

Say not in grief he is no more

Live in thankfulness he was