Grief Strikes Where Love Struck First*
(on the death of a loved one)
When someone we love dies, everything changes. The normalcies of routine possibly give an outward sense of balance, but the turmoil inside resembles wreckage. We sink, wish to remain sunk, everything around us seems trivial - almost as if we can see through the artifice of the world, unable to tell everyone how they were missing out on the most important things in life, as they fight over the insignificant, the trivial.
And as is our wont as good people - we remember the good and the rest is subsumed in a closed vault inside our soul.
And I wonder - what is ever normal?
And I wonder about this connect of love, the dependence, the care, the thought, the absolute faith.
Are we emotional limpets to love? Do we grow stunted in love? Is care just an euphemism for dependence? Is the gift of attention a form of smothering?
Is what we call love just an emotional crutch?
When someone we love passes on, we can see our worlds contract, we see ourselves stand diminished, and we can suddenly see with incredible clarity how much we are an accumulation of all that we’ve now lost. In a strange way, we know we’ve become representatives of who and what’s lost, the protector of the flame.
And then we realize how love is always a completion. We come as sketches and it’s who we love who fill us with the colours which make our lives iridescent, and us a 3D rendition of life itself.
We are lucky if our beings have overflowed with a loved one's presence, cantankerous and problematic as they might have been, because deep inside every such relationship is the kernel of care, the warmth of which fills our life - it burns when it breathes, it glows like a flame when it’s gone.
*-Anne Michaels, from ‘Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers’
Grief Strikes Where Love Struck First
When is it ever normal?
.
And I wonder how can I feel both
empty and full,
rudderless and determined.
.
Or is this what it always feels like?
.
Here was the woman
I fought every day of my life,
who interfered with every fibre of her being -
listened into doors, opened drawers,
checked phones, eavesdropped,
and gave grandiose
unneeded (and unheeded) advice.
.
And here I am now,
missing every bit of her, including
her rasping tone and gnarled hands.
.
I guess,
we are habits to loved ones,
determined not to break
the string of coexistence,
as we ease our beings
into the presence of love
till it’s indistinguishable from need.
.
What a privilege it is then,
to not remember what no longer matters,
to miss her such that my heart cracks
into smithereens as I hyperventilate
with just her thought.
.
The tiniest inflection, the flicker of a smile,
the opening of the door,
to sit with me as I ate,
to look at me as if I was the world,
to wake nights to check
no nightmares had drifted into my room -
she was omnipresent
like my birthmark,
like the quiescent blood in my body.
.
Where will I be tomorrow?
What will I be tomorrow?
So much of me was subsumed in her,
so much of me had become her,
that even as my breathing winds down,
comforted by the touch of her legacies,
I know myself now
as merely what she’d left behind -
chintzy teacup,
the tiny jade buddha,
the framed Rumi quote,
the credit slips she didn’t throw away,
a drawer full of years’-old new linen,
me.
.
We would all wait for her brand of love.
Hear the poem here -
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