Losing a loved one

Grief is a shapeshifter. The moment you think you have grasped it; it morphs into something else. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross pinned Grief down and dissected it into five stages — Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining, Acceptance. Joan Didion captured Grief on the page when she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. And so, that is how I thought I’d deal with grief — a little bit of cognitive dissection, a little bit of affective expression. But grief does not have a face, grief does not hold a definite shape. Sometimes it is a sticky, dense mass lodged in the back of our throats. Some cope with scrubbing it clean till they’re sore. Some let it choke them, let it take their voice. And some lie to themselves, pretend it does not exist.

White lies are like a spring day

haphazardly spray painted over a winter night.

The frigid air can still be felt.

“Ajoba, I will come back and see you again soon.” A white lie I told to protect us both.

I was sitting by my grandfather’s feet as he lay in bed. The remote control in his right hand, flipping through tv channels mindlessly. The sounds on the tv jumbled with the thoughts in my head. He switched the television off, sat up and placed his palm on my head. I could feel his hand shaking. “No, you won’t. But I know you will do well in life. Be good.” I left for Australia that night. It was the last time I saw him.

With denial comes avoidance,

with denial comes confusion,

waves of shock, moments of elation.

What is denial but a lie for preservation,

what is denial but fear cloaked in a stronger disposition.

We sat in the doctor’s office. Ajoba’s MRI scans were on the table in front of me and I kept wringing my hands as I stared at them, trying to understand what any of it meant. My mother was sitting next to me, but I couldn’t focus on anything except how cold my hands were. The doctor walked in with a smile as crisp as his white coat. The chair creaked as he sat down. When he told us there was something unusual going on with Ajoba’s liver, but we didn’t need to panic at that stage — another white lie — we knew it was cancer. I bit the inside of my cheek all the while we were in that office and left without shedding a tear. When I cried on our way back home, my mother held my hand and I wondered how much strength one must harbor to not break composure even after coming to know that a loved one was going to die.

After a long exhausting week of tests, we finally got a report that confirmed what we already knew. Cancer. Something about reading those words on paper stung. As if we had manifested it into the universe by anticipating it. This was when I realised composure during such times didn’t come from strength. It came from fear. A fear that we would unravel so far, it would be too hard to put ourselves back. And so, we kept our composure.

Cancer is a thief. It had made a home inside Ajoba, slowly stealing him away from us. For us loss arrived months before death. There was no warning, there were no signs. And after death it stayed there, it grew, it became sentient. It had a hold over us long before we realised it. I cough out loss on random days despite myself. As if my body is trying to get rid of it, my immune system attacking my pain to save me from choking on my own supressed emotions. And they bleed into my writing, staining all my words.

Back then when I told Ajoba that I would see him again, he was giving me a goodbye I didn’t want. He was giving me a chance to grieve while he could still be there to hold me. But I didn’t take it. I promised him that I would come back sooner than he thought and that I would call him so often that he’d think I had never left. To that he gave me sad eyes and a thank you.

Months later I would be in Australia and my dad would call me to tell me that Ajoba in his state of delirium thought that I was home with him and had conversed with him that afternoon. I like to imagine what he must’ve seen. Me, leaning in the doorway wearing my oversized black tee and sweatpants, holding a cup of green tea and talking about my day. Him, sitting on his bed with the newspaper in his lap and his gold framed glasses hanging at the edge of his nose, a gentle smile on his face. As if I had never left, as if I had kept my promise.

Here comes the last step,

the final stage has arrived.

Now that you have felt it all,

you must close your eyes

and rest.

But grief is not linear, grief is not a test.

Acceptance is nothing but acceptance, at best

and it is miles away from resolution.

There are many ways in which circumstances can pull a person apart. Routine works like glue in such cases. Ajoba would wake up every day at the same time without an alarm. Everything he did had a set time and a set order. If things didn’t go according to his routine, he seemed visibly uneasy. Scowling at his driver, snapping at everyone that got in his way.

Every night he would wait for it to be 9pm so that he could switch his television on, make a glass of Red Label whiskey and smoke. He would watch Marathi soap operas till it was 1am and go to bed. On some weekends my parents would join him — mom with her vodka soda and dad with his whiskey on the rocks and they would talk for hours. My mother and Ajoba being in the legal field and my father having a keen interest in law meant they often talked about interesting cases they encountered at work. Once I was old enough, I would often sit with them and listen. Despite my minimal knowledge or experiences in life, Ajoba would ask me about my opinions. His eyes would light up when I spoke. Every time I sat with them, he would say to my parents, “Only she loves me. Look at how she always keeps me company.” I also had a routine on those nights. I would ask him to quit smoking and shake my head when he’d say yes and change the topic. I would wash the cigarette smell out of my hair the next day, but my worry lingered. One time I asked him how long he had been smoking. He tried sounding nonchalant when he told me he had started the day my grandmother passed away and hadn’t stopped since. His voice betrayed him. He had tried stopping when I was in school, but it didn’t stick. As if quitting felt wrong. His voice trembled as he told me that he smoked to cope with losing her and then it had just become a habit. I do not know if it was the coping or the smoking that was the habit.

My grandmother passed away of cancer a month before I was born. All I know is everyone in my family managed to split themselves in two halves — one to celebrate my birth and the other to mourn her death. My mother tells me that when I was born, I became Ajoba’s world. Loving me had become a cherished part of the routine. It was me for one half and Marlboro cigarettes for the other.

One afternoon, a few days after the diagnosis that the cancer had spread through his body, Ajoba asked something to my mother that still plays in my head. “Do you think she’s waiting for me up there? She must’ve moved on to another life by now.”

Maybe mourning can become a habit. Maybe we never really come to terms with loss, we just make coping with it a part of our routine.

I have shuffled through my memories

to find a moment that would work like a salve.

But grief is a wound too gaping.

We moved to Mumbai when I was in 3rd grade and lived with Ajoba is his government allotted apartment for a few years. It was a fancy apartment with a view of the ocean. There were so many things in that Mumbai apartment that captivated me. The cane swing in my bedroom, the white marbled prayer room that always smelled like sandalwood, but most of all, Ajoba’s office.

As one entered the apartment, the office was a few steps on the right. I have always called his office as the library. It was a small, cosy room. A wide wooden table with neatly arranged stacks of papers, stationery and shiny paper weights took most of the space in the room. I don’t remember the colour of the walls because they were covered with books. To me they were book coloured walls. I would trace my finger over their spines, pull out books whose names seemed interesting to me then. The books ranged from law related books to novels to picture books. Names like Sydney Sheldon, Jeffery Archer, Ayn Rand, tumble out of my memory though I never read them then. One shelf was dedicated to books by PG Wodehouse. Another one to classics with their hardbound emerald green covers, titles embossed in gold ink. I would pull out War and Peace because it was the thickest, flip through its yellowed pages even though the words were too hard for me to understand then. On the wall facing his desk on the lower shelves were books for me and my little sisters. Other than the picture books from when we were babies and our mother’s books from her childhood, the Encyclopedias that Ajoba bought for me and my sisters were my favourites. We would sit around them and go through its glossy pages for hours looking at pictures of animals, plants, cities, foods, cultures.

The library was always open. I don’t remember a single time the door to that room being closed. Even during meetings, he would leave the door open just a crack. I would peep in once in a while when he had these meetings because in those slivers of moments, I got a look into his life when he wasn’t my Ajoba. When he wasn’t in his office, it would be my office. I would sit in his chair and my little sisters would sit facing me and we would draw or read or play in there for hours. He kept his old draft papers for us, and we drew on them — stacks and stacks of law jargon covered in drawings made with crayon and sketch pens. It was my little bubble where I would make up stories with coloured pens and dream like children do.

Ajoba moved in with us after he retired. He donated all the books from his office. There was nothing tangible left. I kept the memory of the little office tucked in the back of my mind like a photograph.

Now that he is gone too, I wonder if that is how I must mourn- through memories.

Books in the library of life

only have stories with open endings.

Infinite meanings,

abrupt sentences.

I was reading your story,

oblivious that I was on the last page.

If you like my work, please check out my poetry: https://www.amazon.com.au/Angst-Tanvi-Bhide-ebook/dp/B0792X9V23/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=angst+tanvi+bhide&qid=1594869575&sr=8-1