Pastime for the Powers that be?

 

Yawn! I’m bored. Who shall we do today?

You know, there’s a family I’ve been keeping an eye on.

What made you notice them?

The lady constantly sends messages to her friends and family saying she is so content that she couldn’t ask for anything more in life.

Oh! She is really asking for trouble! And why is she so content?

Well – she lives with her husband in a beautiful house with a garden, surrounded by flowers and greenery, waking up to the sound of birds.

That’s not so uncommon.

Her husband is enjoying his retirement after 40 years of hard work. They are friends and share a similar taste in movies, music and books.

Ok, a little less common, but still…

They have two sons – and they brought them up with the freedom to follow their passion, not necessarily become engineers or start earning big sums of money.

Really? And what do the sons do?

Well, one is a passionate environmentalist, cartographer and drone specialist, who loves his work. He set up his own organisation and has a very happy team who adores him. And.. he is married for the past 7 years to a very intelligent young woman. They both love sunsets and cats.

And the younger one?

He’s also a conservationist, and is figuring out how to work in the sports line while increasing awareness about the environment in the community. He loves  all sports, and the outdoors, and is very happy. And… he has a very lovely girlfriend.

Hmmm… My goodness, this is almost cloying. So what do you think we should do? Give her cancer?

I don’t think that would be enough. Her outlook is so positive that she’ll come out of it successfully. And, they have enough money to handle the treatment without it causing a serious dent.

Oh ok… that won’t work then. It’s no fun when they are able to handle things well. Maybe make them feel lonely and un-loved?

We can’t. They have a wonderful loving family, and a huge network of friends who keep in touch constantly. They really do have a too-good-to-be-true life.

Goodness! You should have told me about them earlier. How did we leave them alone for so long?

Well, we did threaten the family with potentially serious illnesses a few times. And they do have her mother with them, and she’s fully dependent and spends her day on a wheelchair.

But..?

But they handled all that quite well.  There is concern about the mother’s quality of life, but they have managed to make her very comfortable.

Ok…. Let me think. You know how people in their late 30s are just dropping dead inexplicably,  with the possible reason being the heart, the lungs or just plain COVID? Let’s go with that. And let’s go with that when they have just had a wonderful day together, filled with laughter. That way, they will feel the absence even more.

And they did. And we do.

6 months or Half a year or 184 days.. + 2 more days

When am I ever going to laugh out loud like this, watched so lovingly by someone who worships me ??

186 days, half a year - this is how long it has been since I have heard my son’s voice call out to me, or laugh out loud or give me a hug or….. Keeping a count of the days is not going to help in any way, nor is making a list of all the things that I do not have any more. I know this during my calmer moments - thankfully these occur more often than before - and I am able to stop my thoughts from spiralling downwards into the What ifs and the Whys and the Hows.

But then the calm moments are only that, short and temporary. The past few days have been really tough, and everything I see or do has been triggering off memories of Shashank and then the waves of grief carry me off on a, by now all too familiar, rollercoaster. By the time I am able to talk/think myself off, I am physically in gut-wrenching pain, my eyes are burning and a splitting headache. Talking is not helping, nor is reading or watching or knitting or crocheting. I am hoping that writing is going to be the remedy for today which has been a really tough one for various reasons.

I have read enough now about bolstering myself with happy memories, but how does one go on doing that while constantly being reminded that there will be no more new memories that are not tinged with sadness, for ever and ever as long as I live? The past week has been so strange. My husband, younger son and I went out for meals together and I had to stop myself from asking for a table for 4 at every restaurant. There was always the fourth chair vacant at our table, reminding me constantly of ‘the presence of an absence, the absence of a presence’. I heard this phrase for the first time in one of the talks on grief handling that I watched, and it resonated. 

I met a stranger during my morning walk, and only while talking to him did I realise how adept I had become at forming my sentences. “My 2 sons moved to Goa 5 years ago. “They both did their Masters in Conservation”. “One of them married”. The gentleman would have gone away with absolutely no idea that only of my two sons was with us. One of the reasons for my strange sentence-formation could be that my grief is my own, and I have no inclination to share it with strangers. However, it is interesting that these sentences are coming out of my mouth without any conscious effort on my part. 

Already an efficient multi-tasker (or so I believe), over the past six months, I have mastered the art of crying silently while going about with my daily routine without agitating the rest of the family.  What other skills am I going to acquire in the next few days, months and years?