Last night on a whim I decided to write for my blog for this whole month. I am not sure if and how far I’ll go but I am gonna try for sure. It was mostly coming from a space of restlessness, of having accumulated so much inside me last two and a half years and not being able to put it in words.
I came to the blog to just check when I had written last, and it was June 10, 2018. I nearly choked reading the date because it was a post I had written two days before mom went into coma. Two days before our lives changed forever. I nearly choked thinking of those two days and how casually I would have called momma two times a day, how I wish it never had happened, and that she had never left. But she is gone, and I have a lump in my throat as I type this, her beautiful framed photo on the bookshelf, watching over me with her loving eyes.
Now it makes sense to me about why I didn’t get around writing from June 2018 to right now - I really just wasn’t ready. Writing may have been cathartic, as many recommended it to me, but I wasn’t in great mental health to form coherent sentences. I may have drowned myself in a lot of other things (mostly unproductive, not-so-healthy things) to process my grief but I simply couldn’t write. Probably the only long-form content I read during this time was on grief. My bookshelf is overflowing with all the unread books. I remember binge-watching content nights on nights, I remember installing dating apps and randomly chatting up with men I wouldn’t chat with normally, and most importantly I remember abusing my body by eating whatever junk I could lay my hands on. This is quite embarrassing to even write considering how in my last post, I wrote 800 words on my fitness journey.
But honestly, I didn’t have a mechanism to deal with my grief and food seemed to be a familiar territory that could be my comfort zone. It took me a good one year after mom to understand that she would really not like what I was doing to myself.
Nothing can prepare you for this, there’s no manual on how to deal with grief. I was functioning on extremely heightened sensitivity. I would be laughing one minute and would drop into a pool of tears the next minute. Whatever I did, wherever I went, there would come a point when I would mentally withdraw and go inward, where there was this huge void staring at me. Let me tell you this still happens, and I am sure it’s gonna stay. Every day there is a point when I stop in the middle of something, either work or cooking or listening to music or talking to my sister or just any unrelated thing, and realize that mom is no more with us.
Grief is when you have had a perfect day at work and then you lay your head on the pillow at night, only to howl into a silent night and beg her to come back. Grief is when you have put on red lipstick and then another minute you burst into tears because red lipstick was her favorite. Grief is when you are doing Diwali pooja and in the middle of aarti you end up crying because she made Diwali the best festival for us.
I continue to learn, fail, make wrong choices, have my overthinking overpower my life, cry at the drop of a hat, think I am weak but deep in my heart I now know that I am strong, I am healing and I am trying to bring some purpose to my existence, and that mom would be proud of me.
The journey from June 10, 2018, to December 1, 2020, has been the longest, most painful journey I have undertaken, something I wish I could undo, but here we are.
