Living With Grief – Dealing With Empty Spaces and Free Time (Part 3)
By Roopa Swaminathan
Author’s Note
Living with Grief is a series of articles on my journey into loss and grief. Life as I knew it upended when I lost two people closest to me in a span of one week in December 2020. As much as those around me – friends and family, art, films, music, and literature – tried to explain the process of grieving, the reality is that the heartbreak I felt was at a level that was/is unimaginable to me.
It was also a time when I had to face some stark realities of life. Time did not lessen my pain. There was/is no end game here – even though many around me want me to ‘suck it up’ and ‘get over it’ and ‘move on’ because my constant grieving affects ‘their mental well-being’. Some 18 months later – I still wake up and go to bed with the same intensity of grief I felt back in December 2020. What has changed, however, is that I’ve learned to live with my loss. I’ve learned to navigate my way through life with grief as a constant.
I wrote this series as a way to handle the many truths that I faced in these past 18 months. I wrote it as a way to heal. But honestly, every single day is still a struggle. But writing has helped. I hope these stark ruminations during the worst week of my life and its aftermath can help you in some small measure.
God Speed.
I worry that I may be unable to explain myself with this post.
See…when we lose someone – the loss kicks us back so much that we lose a sense of who we are. That’s natural. We miss those who have left us behind. We miss them all the time. We miss their love. We miss how much they cared for us. We miss how much we meant to them. And when you lose your parents – we wonder and yearn if there will ever again be someone else to whom we will be the be-all and end-all of everything.
While I’m not trying to quantify loss (not trying to measure it by any means) BUT I’d reckon that losing a child is probably the hardest of all losses. I can’t even begin to process what a mother and father go through when he/she loses a child. I don’t have children. But when you carry a child in your body for nine months and literally push them out of your body or you adopt them and then love them, take care of them, protect them, and raise them…only to lose them? I mean – that kind of loss is beyond my purview of understanding.
I think the loss of parents or parental figures is probably the next most difficult loss to bear.
And the days after you lose someone – you can physically feel your heartache. Not the emotional heartache – my heart physically ached for many days. I felt sorrow within every nook and cranny of my body. I mourned my parents unlike any other.
I think what I’ve described above…a lot of us can understand.
But over the past few months – as the intensity of the loss has gone down for me from a 100 to 98 – I’m now starting to sense another type of loss and pain. Well, it does not torment me as much as it’s a physical vacuum in my life that losing my parents has left behind. And it’s a whole different type of agony to deal with.
It’s trying to make sense of their loss physically and in terms of actual space. The fact that they are PHYSICALLY NO longer there.
It’s the dent in the right side of the three-seater couch where amma always used to sit. Over the past year – because of the pandemic and the quarantine measures in place – she’d sit there when she was free and constantly surf between her favorite YouTube videos and Facebook. She knew more about YouTube and video angles and followers and comments on the social media platform than most kids under 20 do. I see that dent and I ache.
I cannot walk by my appa’s computer desk and his laptop without remembering the hours he’d spend playing solitaire or sending and reading emails (99% of which were junk mails from the million and one websites and their newsletters he’d subscribed to) and muttering cuss words in English, Tamil and Bengali while paying bills and he had to enter convoluted passwords with a symbol, a number, a made-up word not in a dictionary that started with a capital letter.
It kills me to walk through the aisles of the local grocery store where appa and I would go shop together. And every single time – without fail – appa would complain about how the store would rearrange items. “The coffee was in aisle 8 last week but today it’s in aisle 6. Maggi noodles were on aisle 4 last week but I can’t find them today. Why do they keep changing where they keep the items?” I HEAR him in my head when I go grocery shopping now and I’m teary-eyed every single time.
It was heartbreaking for me to look into the master bedroom where Amma and Appa slept. And after they were gone – the beat-down bed looked almost as tired and weary as both my parents got towards their end. Looking at the weary dressing table with Amma’s bindis scattered all over and remnants of Nycil powder scattered inside the drawers gutted me. After the second day of their passing – I would close the door to the main bedroom because it was devastating to look inside.
It was even tougher when I finally mustered up the courage and cleaned the room. I gave away the bed, the nightstands, and the dressing table to the security staff at the condo where I live. And now there’s an empty space where amma and appa used to be.
And I’m honestly not sure what’s worse – having the empty bed or an empty room – but suffice to say both of which have left a gaping hole in my heart.
I can go on.
The kitchen where amma cooked till, literally, hours before she was admitted to hospital. The pooja corner where an otherwise bickering amma and appa came together and prayed. The little nook at the entrance of our apartment from where appa would pick up our daily newspaper in the morning or the milk packets that amma would bring from inside the weather-beaten cloth bag that still hangs outside our front door.
I had NO idea that apart from the emotional and mental loss that I would feel – there is a whole other sense of loss I feel. The one of space. It’s such a vast gaping hole now where they once lived and thrived.
And then there is all that extra time I have on my hand. What do I do with all my free time now?
This entire past decade – I felt like I had no time off. I had work and when I came home – I had my parents to look after and their myriad life concerns and issues and illnesses to take care of. It was always one doctor after another, one financial decision after another – one emotional heartache and tragedy to deal with after another.
It was always go, go, go without nary a stop in between.
And the past 18 months were all the above multiplied by a million. Jan 2020 – December 2020 were particularly BRUTAL for me. While I was very lucky I got to spend the last year of my parents’ lives with them – being with them 24/7 (with a full-time job and taking care of the house and, towards the end, becoming my father’s full-time caregiver) meant that I literally had NO free second. I groaned and moaned and whined and complained. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes quietly. I yearned for one free moment – a moment where I could just stop and just be. Just sit back and smell the roses. Take in a new movie or a TV show without constantly worrying about amma and appa.
I yearned for an end to it all. I was so, so, so exhausted. Physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially – I yearned for an end to all of it.
And by December 28, 2020, I got my wish.
Both my parents died.
But – that’s NOT the end I wanted. I craved for a time when both my parents would get better and we’d get back to our normal lives.
Instead…they died.
Leaving me behind with all the time in the world. I no longer have the same kind of financial burden or emotional strain. There’s no faint and beat voice of appa constantly calling out my name and wanting to make plans for the future. There’s no amma worried AF about her ailing husband. I’m able to watch all the TV shows and movies to my heart’s content. All of the responsibilities I had – emotional, physical, financial – ended because they’re both gone. I now have the free time I pined for. I have peace. The quiet. The stillness.
And I would now give my right arm if I could go back in time and get back the madness and the chaos that I had when they were both alive. No. I wouldn’t want them ill. But, oh, what wouldn’t I give for one more conversation with them, one more time being yelled at by amma for drinking tea at midnight, one more time listening to appa narrate yet another story from his time in Neyveli that I’d heard at least a million times already.
Because, you know…peace and quiet? Yeah. So highly overrated.
And the biggest discovery of them all? The worst thing about wanting something so badly? It’s actually getting it.
