Coping with loss

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE

Most of us feel squeamish when faced with the prospect of writing a eulogy if only because it brings us face to face with our own mortality. As someone who suffers from white-coat hypertension, a morbid fear of needles and that weird delusion where one reads about the symptoms of some random ailment and is promptly convinced that one has the disease, I feel as if I’m staring into the abyss.

Inevitably, we have all faced loss at some point in time in our lives: a beloved childhood pet, aunts, uncles, a parent but all of these, while tragic enough at the time, do not even come close to the mind-numbing, soul-shredding, tsunami of grief that comes with losing a child. One feels the pain of the child’s untimely passing until the dawning of the day of the Lennon-esque revelation, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans…”

With this comes the deeper insight that we are all motoring down the busy road of life, caught up in the quotidian until that moment that we are plucked from this mortal coil. Of course, we’re insignificant specks in this vast cosmos but every once in a while, a special being blazes like a comet across the banality of our lives which gives us hope that we were created with a higher purpose.

My nephew, Rishi, was one such special being who filled 17 years on earth with all the precious things that give joy and meaning to life: music, laughter, family, confidence to plough a lonely furrow free of the shackles of the herd, all of it rooted in a deep and abiding concern for his fellow man. At 14, he organised a violin recital fundraiser for the Snehagram Foundation in Bengaluru with the help of his mentor at the Peabody Music & Dance Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. Snehagram is a vocational and rehabilitation center whose mission is to enable self-sufficiency in children living with HIV.

At the same time, he was no goody two shoes but a remarkable young man with many facets whether it was the DIY ear-piercing or getting Ramu the Ulsoor barber to give him a silver-streaked widow’s peak. Tobogganing through the icy Swedish tundra to witness the glorious natural phenomenon of the Northern Lights, spending time on George of the Jungle’s farm in the wilds of Sirsi and staying up all night to witness the miracle of birth, gently stroking the newly born calf, brokering an armistice between his adopted stray cat, Gatsby, and the family dog, Summer, or composing an ode to a beloved grandma…these were the sum and substance of a typical Rishi day. How can one forget his first love: the joy of cross-country running which at its essence is man pitted against the elements in the manner of the elusive Raramuri, the lightning-footed lost tribe who occupy the remote hills of Chihuaha, bordered by Sinaloa and Sonora. Yes, it was a short life but what a joyous one.

At the core of all our belief is the knowledge that we are mere travellers placed on this planet for a finite period of time.

Those of us who seek a higher purpose and look for meaning in this life and the hereafter grope uncertainly seeking portents of an infinity where we will attain our higher calling. Powerful minds of the calibre of a Hawking or a Dawkins have grappled incessantly with this question which remains unanswered but perhaps Rishi’s comet-like blaze sheds some light on this conundrum. Perhaps the quality of life we achieve on this planet in our allotted time is what determines the size, shape and environment of the galaxy we attain in our next avatar. Guwayu, dearest Rishi, until we meet again.