“Love is so short, forgetting is so long,” said Pablo Neruda the Chilean poet in his poem "Tonight I can write the saddest lines." True grief has no closure. We carry it with us like a gaping wound. Sometimes the end comes so fast and there is no time to transition from one phase to the other. It is a matter of wonder how a life spent together seems so brief, so infinitesimal.
Absence becomes a haunting presence. In those spaces of absence I hear the voice, the footsteps, I sense the presence and in my mind’s eye, the million expressions I knew. The smile, the glint of anger, the glow of happiness, the gentleness of love. We filled in each other’s sentences and thoughts and our silences were companionable silences. We were each other’s souls, each other’s alter egos. People come and go offering their condolences and in spite of their best efforts but words seem too frail, too inadequate to assuage the pain.
In the randomness of life, death comes unannounced when least expected. In the quiet aftermath, we realise that mortality is the stuff of life and the vanity of grieving for those we must soon follow
Love is an emotion that is larger than those who love because everyone has loved and ennobled it. The capacity of the human heart to love and grieve and carry pain and build memories in the ruins of loss is enormous. I understand the unreasonableness of and the absurdity of longing for permanence in an ever-evolving world. We must accept the trauma of death we are all heir to, have the gratitude for what we had and understanding that nothing is meant to last.
When we mourn someone we also mourn ourselves as we were and as we will never be again. Nothing changes, the inexorable laws of nature decree the universe will run as it does, friends and strangers move on in their own orbits. We are but insignificant specs in the ominous scheme of things, prisoners of the human predicament.
In my naivete I ask myself, "how does the sunshine and the birds sing in my sorrow?” No one could have expressed the colossal emptiness of life for those left behind better than the Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh, who wrote on his wife's 28th death anniversary, "she was gone/and then were gone one by one/many days and flocks of birds/ and several languages/ and numerous water sources were gone/from the world/Once she was gone.”