Losing Her

I was two when my grandfather died. A two-year-old is too young to understand the loss of a person. Too young to feel the weight of the grief death leaves behind. But I remember sleeping with my mother’s face cupped in my small hands every night after that, so maybe I didn’t exactly understand grief at that time but I did know loss, enough of it to be terrified of losing someone again. That fear dwindled as I grew up, memories already blurring, leaving their remains until they just became a part of the past that lost its magnitude with age.

These days I have been thinking of how I read about death in books, something that starts with shock, numbness that melts into grief and later quiet hope because one has to learn to live without their loved ones someday, has to learn how to deal with it without ripping off parts of themselves in the process. I have read so much death in books and cried even more about it that at some point I was really convinced I knew how a real one felt like because a lot of them felt so real, you know? I grieved characters like real people and there was this feeling in me somewhere that since I have gone through them, since now I have some idea of how it feels like to lose someone, perhaps it wouldn't hit me that hard if I ever did in my own life. But I was wrong. And it did. I guess there are some things books don't tell you or maybe they do in some ways but you don't truly understand; things like:
There is a void a person’s death leaves behind and you wish you could ignore it at times, shove it in the corner to breathe properly for one little moment but it doesn’t let you. The void follows your every step, clings to you like a second skin, and forces you to breathe it even if it feels like it scorched your insides on its way in.

Because even when they are gone in an instant, it takes far more time to your body and your mind to get used to their absence. Because the familiarity of their name has still not faded away from your tongue and one day you find yourself yelling to your mother without a second thought that it is time for Amma's dinner and immediately freezes as your mom stares at you, the air stifling between the two of you with discomfort and a quiet, unspeakable acknowledgement of death. That acknowledgement jars your bones, hitting you square in the face with this sudden, inescapable understanding. Because her room is too empty, the silence too overwhelming, the bed too cold, the house too dull. Because when you close your eyes, you can still feel her presence in the darkened corners of your house, hear her voice demanding why you came home so late, feel her stroking your hair when you slept beside her. Because now when you wake in the middle of the night to see if she’s breathing, to make sure her fragile body is moving in sync with her breath, you realize the futility of it. Because you desperately want to fast forward to the part where death becomes familiar, a passing nightmare, but instead you are stuck in time with the unrealness of it and a complete, utter helplessness that it brings along.

That’s what they don’t tell you in books.

I’m realizing loss is something that can never be entirely felt through pages and words and characters, no matter how much you think otherwise. It’s only on troubled mornings and lonely nights that you feel the physical aspect of it, the ache draining your body, eyes burning with unshed tears and a bitter certainty that it’s going to be a long, long time before you are okay.

Maybe not ever.

I wrote this on 29th August, 2017. 19 days after Amma passed away. I think my intention was to honestly write about the confused, jumbled state of emotions I was feeling, realising how much it all strayed away from the way books describe death and grief or at least the way I used to interpret it before (because they do describe it accurately a lot of times, I just didn't understand them fully) but now I read all of this and it sounds exactly like I didn't want to: too over-elaborate, a bit dramatic maybe. So I am going to clarify things a bit more here. What I meant to say was, losing her was more like a physical experience than an emotional one. It makes me remember this line from Saving Francesca where Francesca's mom tells her, "A piece of me is gone. I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.". And that's it. That's exactly how I felt. But not in a metaphorical/figurative sense that some piece of me is gone or I lost a part of my soul or heart when she died. No. Instead, it was like she took parts of me away with her, pieces of me that were me, that I grew up into. The me that used to sleep beside her, the me that braided her hair on Sundays, the me that would curl up inside her blanket on winter mornings even though it smelled terrible because I felt too lazy to care, the me that was so used to hearing her call my name for the silliest of things that half of the time I would pretend not to listen, the me that knew the exact smell of her hair when she came from her bath, the me that knew the exact feel of that wrinkled, paper-thin skin of her arm where I held her for support, the me that used to check up on her at night to see if she was still breathing for she slept so quietly, her chest moving so faintly that sometimes it felt like she wasn't. The body remembers different than the mind, you know. It takes longer for the absence to sink in the body, for its responses to the other person to go away. Muscle memory. Second nature. Those things take years to fade.
                    The thing is, it's impossible to grow up in someone's presence, to share a room with them more than half of your life and not have them become a part of you; they creep into your life and attach themselves to it even though your relationship with them wasn't exactly loving all the time, even though you have felt nothing beyond hatred for them at some point. My feelings for her are still the same, somewhere muddled up between love and hate, except now there's this almost palpable, oppressive feeling of absence with it; things and habits that were ripped away from me and sometimes..they just hurt. I didn't think it would; I wasn't nearly as close to her as people normally are to their grandparents but god, it still doesn't stop me from thinking about her even now. I wish I could just stop that part of my brain that actively tries not to think about her which only leads to thinking of her more but I have no idea how to do that and when this would all get a bit more easier.