Buddha in Me
Excerpts
Q. How do you explain the feeling of loss that was sudden and abrupt?
A. From my personal experience, I think first you feel the earth beneath you is shaking, you feel tremors, then everything around you collapses, and you feel buried under the debris with a sense of nothingness. With some courage, you start clearing the debris to save whatever you can get your hands on and then, you just feel numb. And with these enclosed emotions, it appears the best way forward is to carry on with things as usual, as if nothing has happened. You keep the charade of routine, but more or less, you are always unsettled inside. You feel that you have lost your place in this world, and as if nothing makes sense anymore.
Q. But can anyone, in all honesty, describe what it feels to lose a part of you, with losing a parent, a sibling, a partner, a child, a friend or even when a relationship ends?
A. We are bound to feel pain, anger, guilt, rage, shame and sometimes we may feel overwhelmed with fear and depression. And to overcome all this emotional turmoil we keep re-opening the wounds in our attempt to seek closure.
Q. How does one make peace with people not being alive, not being part of your life anymore?
A. We keep searching for answers, revisiting the past in your memory, going over and over again in our mind, what we could have done differently, or only if I was there, or only if they reached out to me in time. Things which were left unsaid, undone, and how we wish to go back in time and do it all over again, only more mindful this time. But all the ‘ifs and buts’ are just web of emotional speculations, which we keep weaving; it doesn’t lead to any finality, because there is no finality. Ruminating and obsessing over the events and people who are longer there, can leave us entangled emotionally and energetically to those relationships, people and the circumstance.
Q. There is no getting over the loss; it becomes a part of you. It’s that scar which becomes a reminder of this throbbing part of your story?
A. It hurts to know that one can no longer amend the past and this might leave us feeling as if we’re doomed to carry the hurt forever. Trying to get answers, to make sense of things, to find a closure, all culminates into feelings of anxiety, depression, sadness and the echoes of these voids we carry become louder and louder. We experience waves of intense and very testing emotions, ranging from profound melancholy, emptiness, and despair to shock, numbness, guilt, or regret. We might rage at the circumstances of our loved one’s leaving us, whether in abandonment or in death. The worst is this anger is focused on our self, other loved ones and even at God. We may find it hard to accept that the person is really gone and may struggle to see how we can ever recover and move on from our loss. Life may or may not come to a standstill, but the burden we carry propels the struggle to just let go. Sometimes, an ending is so sudden and abrupt, that to understand or accept that person is gone or the relationship is over, we cannot bring perspective to what’s happening, or what will happen now?
There are few things which can be compared to the pain of losing someone you love. One is bound to experience grief and sadness, when a close relationship comes to an end painfully. Severing the invisible chains of attachment with people and relationships that once was important can be difficult, and that’s where the scuffle to seek closure begins. We don’t need to look for answers, we need to acknowledge and accept our grief.
Grief should be a natural response to the loss of your loved one, but society has conditioned us to put up a brave face, look beyond your personal catastrophe. We are taught and we take upon ourselves to fortitude our characters in the soulful time, and emerge as someone who can handle, who can be relied upon in loss by others. But we overlook that in death, grief needs to integrate people, be dealt together in families, with people who care. Instead, we try to put a happy face on things; we negate the role of hurt, pain, and suffering in the healing process, or let the grief take its time and seek instant gratification even in mourning. And that’s why in the moments of grief we see most of the families and close relationships rather than coming together, they crumble, become fractural, disintegrated, and love and trust dissolves. There is no timeline for grief; there is no quick relief from loss.
Grief opens the gate to a flood of complex, often conflicting emotions. It could be controlling and overwhelming and we search for closure in hope to get answers to the causes of the loss and resolve the agonising pain created by it. Like the mind wants to solve a puzzle, or it wants some logical explanation, of not only how and what happened, but also why we feel the way we are feeling when we mourn for our loss
We may remain in denial and act as if we are fine, but we are vulnerable and that can set the tides of emotion to rise high and low. A denial is when we hide true emotions and feelings of numbness to loss. People, who remain in denial, cannot navigate their feelings around grief and they get stuck in the wheel of emotions. Everything becomes a trigger to spin this wheel and they land up on the emotional roller coaster ride of sadness, anger, fear, and loneliness. We need to work through all of this, the grief, the denials, these feelings. Not let the tragedy hold grip on your state of mind and life. Lot of advice people receive to move on, go on about the business of life as usual, but those who refuse to begin the journey through grief simply delay their own recovery.
Closure is not linear, you will not find it or will get from someone, or from travelling to someplace. Closure is not a door that needs to be shut on a tragedy, or on thoughts about a departed loved one. Many of us will carry our losses with us for a lifetime; they become part of who we are. The pain fades but never leaves, but the memories and the love we had for the person, will always remain.
Closure may never come, but healing does, gradually. You might have to hit the bumpy road of self-discovery, without which there is no healing. Loss is forever, when people leave, we feel empty, when relationship breaks, we feel more broken, but we also heal. Healing comes with acceptance and acknowledgement of the fact that what we feel is valid. We heal when we learn to live with our loss, learn how to carry our grief that brings joy and love from our past and create room for all the joy that lies ahead. We heal when we allow ourselves to grieve.
Nothing can replace that person we are grieving for, but where we have a void within ourselves, we can fill it with good memories of the person; we can celebrate love and can have more gratitude for the times we had to experience love, happiness, and togetherness. Life doesn’t always offer the answers we seek or the solutions we crave.
Don’t close your heart on grief; keep the doors of heart open for memories.
Dr. Navita Sandhu
