Dealing with Loss.

Since yesterday, I’ve been ignoring texts and calls. My inboxes are overflowing with people telling me how sorry they are for our loss, people asking me how I’ve been holding up, how it happened, what happened and a million other questions that I am not sure I want to answer right now. Or ever. A part of me just wants to put this all in a corner of my brain and lock it up, and jam the lock shut while I’m at it. But that isn’t the way things work. A loss this big hits you hard. Damage like that doesn’t disappear overnight.

Yesterday was possibly what felt to me like the longest day ever. There was no way yesterday felt real to me. There is one part of me that wants to cry my heart out, and believe me, I did, too. But I feel numb today. It’s like the part of me that wanted to cry yesterday has stopped working all of a sudden following the loss of my grandma. By today, on my way back home, when a kind old lady who, for some reason, smelled like my grandma, smiled at me, I had to do everything in my power to not let my tears burst out at that very moment.

But there’s also this other part of me that doesn’t blame anybody for trying to find a little bit of happiness or comfort during this very difficult time that my family is going through. Yes, the sadness and the gravity of something as hard-hitting as death can throw the best of us out of balance. But isn’t the whole point of remembering somebody to celebrate their life? Why, then, do I feel like I’ll constantly feel terrible for every ounce of happiness that I try to grasp for now?

I’ve shut myself from any kind of social contact in these last two days. Only my innermost circle have stayed in touch. I just don’t feel like having to talk about it over and over again. At the same time, I feel like the people who had the opportunity of knowing my grandma at some point of time deserve to know the truth. This has been the kind of situation that I never imagined myself in— listening to people convey their condolences and asking me for the whole ins and outs. I guess it’s the most adverse situations that really show us how much we can handle.

I thought that if I could make it through yesterday, I could make it through today without falling apart because every other day gets easier. But it doesn’t feel like it yet. Then I remembered something that I keep telling myself. That we can’t fight it, it’s bigger than us. What we can do, though, is let it all in. Because when we bottle pain up, it hits us back tenfold when that bottle shatters. But when we suck it up and deal with the pain, and accept that some things are a part of life’s course and that we can’t really control the circumstances.

‘Sometimes the only way to go is just going on,’ isn’t it? Maybe that is the reality I need to let dawn on me. I’m not okay at this very moment and the only reason I haven’t stopped writing after yesterday is that my grandma hyped the Hell out of my writing and told me to never stop writing, no matter what, because I was good at this.

So maybe I’ll just keep getting through one day at a time until it starts feeling normal and easy again. The loss of somebody isn’t easy to deal with. But it is a part of life, whether we like it or not. I know that I’ll get better but the feeling of despair is something that is just going to drown me for a little while.

Here’s to letting it drown me before I can finally swim in it.

With a heavy heart,

The Shubhster.

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Featured Image by Zara Walker on Unsplash