Change

The only constant

I missed posting last month. Juggling travel, my level 4 clinical hypnotherapy certification case studies, my grief educator certification classes, and the general, humdrum activities of managing a home took a large bite out of my energy levels and attention span. These sound like tepid excuses to my own ears because I had the time, but I had no will. Anyway here we go.

Sakshi enjoying a day out with her classmates in the period between her chemo and HIPEC surgery.

I want to write today about something that has been making its presence felt ever more strongly with each passing day – my changing relationship with grief.

I am in now what the experts call mature grief, though I really think, I am only one floating tune or an audio recording of my daughter’s voice away from reverting to acute and early grief. On most days, however, I am functioning at an almost normal level. When I say ‘normal’ I am not talking about getting things done. I have always managed to get things done. If I were an addict, I would have been that high-functioning addict who could hide their addiction quite well, for the longest time. No when I say, ‘normal’ I am talking about my emotional and mental state.

The knowledge that I cannot turn back the clock has sunk in, and I have accepted that part of life. I have also accepted that I will only meet her again and give her a never-ending hug after my own death. Until then, I have to make do. This is something I have known to some degree or the other since 6th July, 2022, but now I accept it for longer stretches of time, whereas earlier I would have periods of disconcerting haze where I could almost convince myself that I could somehow undo what has happened. It is an unreal hyper real state of being. I cannot explain it.

I have begun to make plans for my life… plans that she cannot take part in physically, but plans that she is inspiring and guiding from the other side. I know this with absolute certainty, but it upsets me to make these plans; and yet I soldier on, because what choice does one really have at the end of the day?

In another three months it will be three years since Sakshi transitioned. It feels impossible and at the same time I feel like I have lived this unwelcome reality for way more than three years. It feels like a lifetime. Interminable time that makes those beautiful years of her infancy, childhood and teen years feel like a dream, that make me question the lived reality of it. Interminable time when often my mind felt like the untamed playground for make-believe, madness, and chaotic thoughts running amok. Maybe I just dreamed it all up. Maybe I never became a mother… it was all a hallucination, because there is no way this could be real. Maybe the Wachowskis and all those mythological texts had it right. We are all just pawns in a cosmic game and there is no free will. The mind is mad. We just play pretend with this sanity game.

Remember Source Code? In it, Jake Gyllenhaal is an army officer who is sent into a virtual re-creation of a train ride, so that he can identify the terrorist who detonated a bomb on it. Jake’s character (a diembodied brain and neural network with a war destroyed body) has to go through this virtual recreation and endure death in a bomb blast quite a few times before he identifies the terrorist. The ending is hopeful because we see his character discovering that the Source Code doesn’t just enable recreation of the past but allows for the creation of alternate lifetimes, and he despite being just a brain in one lifetime, now has a chance at a regular life with a woman he has fallen in love with and with his body and mind intact.

I could almost will the Source Code into existence on some days. I know the alternate lifetime I would create. Maybe such a lifetime already exists in some parallel universe. I hope so.

Even grief can be a habit. In the first two years, I really did not have much control over grief, though after the first year I could direct the paths it would take. I learnt how to inhabit my grief, how to manage it and how to mould it and create some meaning out of my life and the terrible, senseless loss of Sakshi’s passing. But now, when I try and fall back on those learnt habits and reactions, I realise something has changed. My way of inhabiting my grief has changed. It is no longer able to hold my evolving self. And it is no longer able to hold my daughter’s wondrous spirit.

I am looking for her in my grief but she no longer dwells there full-time. She is after all not the kind to indulge. I am being forced outside the confines of my grief to truly find her.

This is by no means easy. It confuses me, angers me, and sends me down different rabbit holes of anguish. There is a grieving one suffers at letting go off inhabiting grief and living in it 24/7, of letting go of its thorny, yet cold-warm comforting embrace and returning to the land of the living.

I no longer wear my grief on my sleeve, but carry it in the privacy of my heart, yet I find myself resenting people for not being clued in enough to know that I am carrying this never-ending ache in my heart. This too is a stage, I tell myself. One day, I will be free of this expectation of intuitive understanding. One day, I will be free of my judgement - of the other and of my own self.