Healing

A post about my journey towards healing and completeness.

I don’t think anyone gets it. No one can, unless they have walked this path. How with a Herculean effort you gather yourself and stitch together the severed pieces, only to have it all fall apart in a split second, as one gazes at an old photo, or remembers something, or hears a tune. And then you have to do it all over again. Gather those pieces, stitch or glue yourself together the best you can. And then repeat and repeat and repeat for the rest of your life. It gets a bit easier each time to recover, though the intensity of the falling apart is so damn unpredictable. Sometimes, the sadness is a vice like headache and some tears and suppressed sobs, other times, an all-out crying session lasting hours, and then at other times, a silent slide into the abyss that will take you days to crawl out off. My grief and recovery muscles are stronger now than when I embarked on this journey.

Having said that, off-late I have been feeling more flustered and agitated. Too many things to do, too may demands on my time, energy and attention, too many distractions, not enough silence, not enough walks, not enough deep breaths and not enough writing. I have also been visited by this great passion to organize the folders in my laptop, mobiles and google drives. My way of trying to control something at least, but it also means looking at photographs that are often triggers.

The fact that we are slowly creeping towards the second anniversary of Sakshi’s passing is also playing like a slow, low, inexorable, ever-present background muzak in my head.

It is not all doom and gloom though. I have been approaching my grief and my healing in a pro-active manner. There are many things and people that help me in this.

First and foremost is my daughter. Sakshi visits me in my dreams… so real that I prefer the term visitation to a dream. They are these beautiful, complex at times, narrations that reveal their meaning to me over days. At other times, it is just a quick ‘hello! I am still with you,’ kind of presence being felt for a few seconds. A dream sustains me over a few days, as though I have had an actual visit from Sakshi at a physical level.

Then there are friends with whom I grieve. One has lost a husband, another a son, and I, my daughter. We have all lost a huge chunk of our hearts and our sense of self. We talk in a unique morse code made up of ‘I know,’ gentle shoulder squeezes, a look and a smile, and simple messages like, ‘how are you doing?’ or ‘thinking of you.’ Messages that would be banal from someone else and to someone else, but to us, hold a sea of understanding and love.

The greatest friendships are the ones that flow down the ladder like looping spools of DNA. My mother who is my greatest supporter, and thinks I am the funniest person on earth, is also someone I can gossip and laugh with, share my dreams, fears, and thoughts with. Fortunately, I shared an equally close or maybe closer relationship with my daughter. I say closer, because she did not get the opportunity to live longer and disagree or fight with me. We got each other’s jokes and completed each other’s sentences. She was my interpreter as I struggled to remember the movie or song titles and would have resort to describing the scenes or humming the tune badly. Everyone else would stare blankly at me and I would turn to her helplessly. She would simply ask, “Is it xyz?’ and she would be right! Every. Single. Time.

God! I miss that. I miss having that person in my life who knew my mind and words better than me.

But I still have my mom. We are useless at figuring out the titles, but we know what the other is talking about. ‘Yeah yeah, I know which movie you mean. It stars that guy who did that other film we liked… but I can’t remember the name.” The other would nod along understandingly.

Then there is my husband who doesn’t whistle anymore. That was their secret code language. He’d whistle a question and she’d whistle back… and I am not making this up, but everyone could understand that exchange. Now he doesn’t whistle. I used to be envious of their ability to whistle. Despite my best efforts all I could manage to do was splatter some spit. My maternal grandmother, who I called Amma, could whistle. I imagine Amma and Sakshi whistling up a storm across the veil.

The other day, Suresh and I cracked a joke and laughed about Sakshi coming down and kicking his butt for something he said in passing. And that was the first time in two years that we remembered Sakshi without the accompanying pit in the heart and the dreadful sorrow. Instead, we cracked a joke about how she would have reacted, if alive, and laughed. Don’t get me wrong! We do laugh about other things – more now than in 2022-23, but in relation to Sakshi, we sigh, we cry, we smile sadly, but laugh is a new one; one she would approve heartily of.

We are all faring much better than we did a year back. That is the way of it, I guess. Time may be a human construct, but it definitely marches forward and softens the edges of the deep gashes on your being.

Then there is learning and writing – I am reading and listening to everything I can that makes me feel more grounded and balanced. I am learning clinical hypnotherapy and reiki. I am meditating. These help me forge a deeper connection with Sakshi.

In the last couple of months, I have been able to write again, and even more happily, feel confident about sharing my writing. I took part in the #NaPoWriMo challenge in April and wrote a poem every single day and shared them on my insta account [this is where you pause and make a mental note to follow my insta account if you are not already doing so.] Some of those poems also found their way into an online literary magazine called Pink Lily.

Of the poems written in April, Cats is one of my favourite.

I don’t know if I have ever shared the story about how I started writing poems. It of course helped that I have a father who walked around quoting Malayalam poems and loved reading the great Romantics. Even as a child, I loved poetry, but the shift to writing one myself happened when I was 20 and fresh out of college, with a degree in commerce and no idea as to what I was going to do with my life.

Through my dad’s good offices, I found a placement in a trading firm in Nungambakkam, in Chennai. It must have been a reasonably successful office, because it had seating for about 8 to 10 people, and a glass covered cubicle for the manager. It also had files and files and more files on every imaginable surface (pre-PC and laptop days). On the first day, I met a man, who rattled out some instructions, that I could not even begin to understand, before he left for the stock exchange. This happened for five days in a row – walk into an otherwise empty office, get inexplicable instructions and then be left alone for the rest of the working day. On one day, I was instructed to deliver some trade related documents to another office – that honestly was the only instruction I understood.

Every other day, I would sit in that musty office bursting at the seams with documents, and look outside the window and watch the progress of a foundation drilling rig’s work in the adjacent plot. I was fascinated by the yellow rig and the work that was happening out there. It felt real and tactile. On day 5, I was sitting and watching the work – they were almost done with digging the foundation – and I felt this rage boil up in me. Along with the rage, there were words. I pulled out a paper (there were lots of that lying around, thankfully) and wrote my first poem. I was however not done. I had one more more poem in me. Wrote that one down too. I must have sat there for half an hour or so, stunned by what had happened. Then I walked to the window, bid adieu to the drilling rig and the foundation, and walked out of that office, to never return again.

I have shared those two poems below. Thirty years down the line, they are a bit cringey for me now, but I still love them :).

I’m also excited about the prospect of working on my long-hibernating novel. For the last four years, I walked around not caring about the story or the characters – everything felt trivial and an utter waste of time. But now, I feel ready to work on it again. Maybe even share it here on Substack as a separate page. If you guys have any feedback, opinion, or comments on this idea, please do share. If you know of another Substack doing this, please do let me know.

As always, my posts are bloody long! I still have so much to say, but will save that for another post. However, I do want to end with –

If you are parents or guardians of kids, go give them a hug, even if they are being stiff and teenager-ish. At least ruffle their hair. Love them till they roll their eyes at you, hug them and don’t be the first to step back, listen… truly listen and flush your oft-repeated instructions down the drain, and be present in the moment. Thankfully, I was able to do these most of the time. So, my regrets are fewer. I am so grateful to God for that! Life is too unpredictable to take the greatest gifts, loves and joys of our lives for granted.

Don’t forget to let me know what you think about the idea of putting my novel out here on Substack, and any leads or advice you have. And now, ta-dah… my old poems :)

Thanks for reading :)

Much love,

Binu