Joan Didion wrote a book called ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, about the grief and mourning that followed her husband’s death in December 2003. This book is investigative journalism attacking the self. A writer’s deep reflection on the end of a symbiotic relationship of 40 years; the bereavement and irrationality that followed; and the vortexes she couldn’t escape.
I’m 19 as I write this.
I was never the target audience for this book. Even as I
binged through reading it, I knew this book wasn’t for me.
But if grief hits everyone the same, I was reminded that it hit
my mother too. I saw what it was like for her to go through the intense grief
following the death of my father. And how she was then asked, throughout the
years, to shed these parts of herself and look ahead. Time and again, people
who grieve are asked not to indulge in self-pity even when every
timed-by-the-clock habit that they’ve followed for decades, have to at once, be
discarded. Conversations and chores would now have to take place one way. If
grief hits everyone the same, she was alone in hers, with the memories she had
made with him for 25 years.
As someone who lost a parent at a young age, and had to grow
alongside the absence of one, it was easy for me to make an upside of the
absence. I could convince myself that this loss made me a better person. That
it made me stronger; and filled me with perspective. It was so easy for me to
create a narrative of growth behind death. But what could my
mother ever do? Would any narrative ever suffice? And would any narrative ever
justify even the use of narratives to make the pain more palatable to move on?
These are not thoughts we hold a decade after losing someone.
With time, you learn to let the dead be dead. You stop looking for the omens
you missed and the lost chances of professing love. You stop holding onto the
fantasy that it was nothing but a dream; that tomorrow he will come by, and we
will resume life as it was. As stuck in time we feel, we learn to move on.
I would never fully know what it was like for her, until I
too, like everyone else, someday experience my share of grieving the loss of a
partner, and a partnership. Until I too someday mourn the loss of the identity
I would have built and preserved for decades then.
Knowing the loss that my parent went through, and at
times still does, and will continue to, in no way reduces her pain. But I can
only hope that this understanding shows in my eyes when I look at her, and in
my voice when I speak to her. As difficult as it can be for a 19-year-old to
show her care through her words and actions, I can only hope that mine do.
This is an ode to a mother whose complexity I still don’t
fully comprehend. This is an ode to her strength. And to all who’ve ever lost a
loved one. As insignificant and meager as it might seem in the grand scale of
things, or even in comparison to the grief of others; it’s still unquestionably
and glaringly present. And we’re all in this pain; alone in our journeys, but
together in our shared humanity.