Wading through tears, together

There is a palpable sense of collective grief in the air and acknowledging its existence is the first step in managing our multiple feelings

We’ve all probably written more condolence notes in the last month or so than we might have at any other time in our lives. My mother, 67, told me the other day that this is the most difficult time she has lived through. And added, I think to console herself, that for the rest of us who aren’t as old as her, life may yet throw up more challenging times. But she’s done with the worst thing that could happen in her lifetime.

Haven’t many, many of us been feeling this way no matter how old we are?

Merely looking at the numbers on assorted Covid trackers doesn’t do justice to the reality of being alive right now. It’s a time of endless bereavement. Some of us are in the thick of devastating personal loss. I cannot presume to know the depth of their grief or speak on their behalf. I write as one of those who is witness to a collective tragedy that feels deeply personal nonetheless.

A tragedy that has meant losing people known and unknown and knowing that those they leave behind are going through suffering that can’t be imagined. The unbearableness of knowing that there are people who have lost a string of family members in a matter of days, or of young people and kids succumbing to the virus or families destroyed overnight with both parents dead and kids left homeless. I could go on. And this is the less gruesome side of the tragedy. How do we even account for those who died gasping for breath because the oxygen ran out? How to make any sense of photographs that show us dead bodies lined up one behind the other waiting for their turn to be cremated? Or respond to stories of bodies being burnt on pavements outside crematoria because along with the life infrastructure even the death infrastructure collapsed? Or muster the courage to speak of the Covid dead who were found floating in the Ganga?

Where do the stories of pain end?

For a while, I tried to shield myself from what seemed like the apocalypse playing out in slow motion and on loop. It was too much to take in. My response in situations where I’m overwhelmed is to shut down. When I found that I couldn’t do that (or shut down Covid), I tried switching off my social media feeds instead. At one point, I even completely shut off the internet on my phone to keep out the bad news, or any news at all. But nothing really helped until I was ready to process all of what I was feeling — the fear, the anger, the hopelessness and beneath it all, the crushing sense of grief that has been enveloping us since the pandemic turned catastrophic in the last few weeks. If this is what is called the take-no-prisoners approach, then Covid has really made it clear what that means.

This essay is a recollection of living at this time and finding the faltering courage to accept the presence of grief in our lives. In my own journey, the grief finally gave way to something like an aspiration for collective healing. You will find the steps of that movement towards the end. I offer these words in the hope that your burden too will be lighter for allowing grief its full play. It’s not the type to take kindly to half measures, in my estimation.

Mining for grief

I did not recognise it at first. It presented itself in the beginning as disbelief and then as horror. On Twitter there were SOSs going out by the minute for hospital beds and life-saving medicines. The ordinary and the well-off, the anonymous and the well-networked seemed equally helpless in the mayhem that the second wave was wrecking in the capital and surrounding areas.

Then came anger when news reports of the oxygen shortage deaths started surfacing. All of this was happening even as campaigning was still on in West Bengal and the Prime Minister had recently made an election speech marvelling at the size of the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak in Asansol. The anger took a while to build up but it seemed like we had reached a point of no return when it emerged that along with the shortage of hospital beds, oxygen and medicines, India was also running out of vaccines — the only way left for us to pull ourselves out of the hellhole we were well and truly hurtling down now.

Perhaps it was the anger that actually alerted me to the unresolved grief within. I remember a heated conversation with my father one night, the night of May 2, just after the Assembly election results had come in from a number of states. I was exulting at the results in West Bengal where the Bharatiya Janata Party had lost and also seething because my father wouldn’t see my point about how the Modi regime had let things go completely out of control. The conversation ended with us deciding not to discuss politics and me feeling even angrier than before. But by the time I went to bed that night, I was beginning to feel terrible about having vented my frustration on my dad. I wrote in my diary, my closest companion during these days: “This small thing, getting to make a point about something about which I am right, does not seem worthwhile.”

If we leave my cockiness at being right aside for a moment, I came around to see that my almost 70-year-old father, who has been through his own share of difficulty in these last few months, did not need more misery heaped on him at the moment. I mean this whole Covid episode kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? It began occurring to me obliquely, I think, that none of us probably have all the time in the world anymore and it doesn’t make sense to spend our time fulminating and raging.

I think that is when I allowed the grief to find me. Once that had happened, it was a matter of days before the accompanying hopelessness, despair and the sense that I was losing it crystallised into a fist-like hard knot I could feel in the centre of my chest. It also helped that I was already in the process of asking questions of my feelings and maintaining some awareness of what I was feeling and where I was feeling it in the body. The need to acknowledge the grief in the community seemed to be chiming in with the work that I was doing of wading through my own personal grief of a lifetime. The two felt completely melded now. I did not bother putting up resistance to the grief anymore or benumb myself to sorrow. I was finally, starkly and completely inconsolable.

The grief did not abate. In fact, it doubled down on me. But something else has arisen in the days since then. The sense that grief is not final. That things may be down but there is still the possibility of being sensitive to what is happening around us and of responding in the way that we can best in our circumstances.

A vigil for the dead

The second wave has been not just about the suffering of losing parents and children, husbands and wives and friends to an unpredictable virus, but also that of being subject to the fact that there is no dignity in death for so many of our fellow citizens. We have suffered terribly as a community of people too.

In fact, at the risk of sounding a little preachy, I would say that the act of acknowledging this collective hurt is as important now as making sure that there isn’t another incident of hospitals running out of oxygen and people dying for want of the most basic care.

This kind of suffering is not easy to live with as those who were witness to Partition will attest. The current time is after all being compared to Partition in terms of its humanitarian tragedy. But we have not bothered to excavate the pain of that time and make peace with it. It’s not worth speculating what shape our unexamined pain will take if we don’t do the difficult work of sitting with our dead right now and allowing the pain of the present time to touch us deeply.

Think of what happens to us when a personal tragedy befalls us, as indeed it has for so many. There is a feeling of being left without answers for the events that have overtaken us and the very real temptation to pin the blame either on oneself or another for what has happened. Sometimes this goes through the process of blaming fate or God, but finally settles down on one of the two ends — the self or the other.

This is what trauma is, loosely speaking, isn’t it? The inability to process fully what has happened to us or to those whom we are close to because of the overwhelming nature of the incident or the threat to life and limb that the event has exposed us to.

This then here is our collective trauma and it’s coming up in so many ways in those around us — anxiety, rage, cynicism and what have you. But just out of view is the hard ball of grief that I found myself face-to-face with and it is there for all of us to encounter and acknowledge if we are willing and able to make the effort.

Maybe the grief of some is so raw that it won’t be possible for them to do the job of processing what has happened to them or the community at large. What spurred me in part to write this reflection was the idea that those of us who are able to can perhaps allow the grief within to burn in our hearts like a vigil for the dead and the suffering. This too is a need of our times.

This collective grief is our connection with others at this time, the point where the self meets the other. The point where it is possible to see how we are all connected by something more than by our intersecting interests alone. The place where we are connected by the fact of our mortality and by our fragility.

Walking with grief

I leave you with a small exercise that welled up and helped me to walk with grief to a place that was bigger than it or all of us individually. It is only for those who may want to make some contact with their grief. If it feels too much for you to do, it’s not the time. You can take it one step at a time or do it later; close your eyes as you do this, if it helps.

What are you feeling right now as you think about the last few weeks of the pandemic? Are you disturbed, angry, sad or something else that seems to have no name, but belongs in this space? See if you can find a place in the body where you can sense these feelings. Be aware of them and let them be.

Perhaps you are feeling something else along with this. Is there a sense of sorrow or grief too? Can you locate where these feelings are housed in your body? If it seems like too much, it’s okay. Know that it is there and it is too much right now.

If you can sense these feelings somewhere in the centre of your being, in the chest, can you see how it feels to remain with the grief, no matter in what form it presents itself? Just seeing it and staying with it.

Do you feel a connection with those who are suffering? Is there care, concern? Can you hold this love for those who are grieving and suffering, including yourself?

Can you allow yourself to breathe in with the knowledge that this love exists? Perhaps you can do this several times. Then maybe you can allow yourself to breathe out into that space and let it do what it needs to do to heal those in pain.

The writer lives and works in Bengaluru. She tweets @homernods