How Not to deal with Loss and Grief

 

I woke up today morning feeling uncomfortable. I woke up today to a message on the family group informing us about the loss of a cousin. She was a 32-year-old, and she lost her life to severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) and lung congestion. She had recently become a mother as well, of all days, on Mother’s Day 2021. Her baby girl is 10 days old, safe, and healthy. Baby girl would never get to know her mother. The mother never got to see her daughter.

This is a story among millions of stories everywhere. All of us have been impacted by this pandemic. All of us. Regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, location. I am writing this post to help myself cope with grief and loss the only way I know how to. By writing. By penning down my thoughts.

 

Coping with loss is difficult, but in the COVID era, it’s even harder. The loss of life is so sudden, that we as human beings are unable to process it. What’s even more difficult is that family members are unable to be by their loved one’s side because of restrictions designed to stop the spread of infection. This separation only adds to the grief and sadness of loved ones left behind. My heart can’t stop thinking about her. Not only did she leave behind her baby girl. She left behind her husband, her mother, her younger sister, and countless other family members, friends, and loved ones who cared about her, loved her.

 

The only way to deal with the loss for me is to write about how I am feeling. The same can be applied if you want to be there for a person experiencing loss. One of the best ways to help a grieving person is to give them a chance to talk. It helps most people to just be heard when we are holding a lot of emotional pain. It is difficult to talk about the pain; we need to feel connected to the person we are talking to and we need to feel emotionally safe — like they care and are interested and want to hear what we have to say.

 

Personally, I have always been a highly emotional and empathetic person. In the same breath, I have also been the one to hide my grief from my family members. I used to feel I don’t need to show my vulnerable self to even my parents, and I wanted to shield them from any stress arising from my inability to cope with my mental stress and agony. That’s what we do right? We want to appear stronger than we are. We want to save our family from any embarrassing episodes of anxiety attacks. From a young age, whenever I faced emotional turmoil, I used to shut myself in my room, bawl my eyes out and come out only when I could face the world. Now as an adult, I feel that this was a very risky move. Now, I find comfort in knowing that I can talk to my parents, my sister, my husband, my mom-in-law,  and they wouldn’t judge me for it.

 

Most of us as human beings, have something which separates us from other living beings. Our ability to be sympathetic and empathetic. It’s our innate natural caregiving instinct that makes us want to soothe people around us and take the pain away. However, when someone is grieving the loss of someone close, we really can’t take that pain away. We can only be willing to listen and share this very human sorrow.

Grief is messy. Anguish is a natural response to loss. There are no right or wrong ways to experience it. There are, of course, commonalities, but our response to loss can be different from person to person. It begins with dealing with acutely intense emotions, preoccupying thoughts, and then over time, we adapt. We try to find meaning in the loss.

 

When I expressed my grief to my parents in the morning today, my father said a very important thing to me. He said, when he had lost his mother at the age of 20, he had lost all will to live. My grandmother was 48, and she was taken way too young. My father said, he just couldn’t cope with the loss. Then he found some sage words of wisdom in a colleague who told him, "from now on, Banerjee you need to act in a way that would make your mother happy. She is, after all, looking over you. It should reflect in all your actions. Actions that would make your mother proud."

 My father had tears in his eyes when he told me this today morning.

There are five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance) which we all know. There is also a sixth, rather underrated, stage. This stage is "meaning". After acceptance, the classic last stage, we strive to find meaning in the hard-to-fathom events and we emerge stronger. "Life goes on" finds a deeper meaning in our souls, while we live out the rest of our allotted days on this plane and move on to the next phase – barzakh, akhirah whatever you may call it in your religion.

Life finds a way.