GRIEF - Pure & Simple

There are some times when an image gets burned into the brain - an image that may be incongruous, or perfectly ordinary but still, like being branded with a searing hot iron, gets burned deep. And will stay there. Till the end of memory.

I remember, January 1989 - walking in to my house in Madras after an all day and an all night trip from Nasik to Bombay to Madras. My younger brother and I - and there he was, my father. Stretched out on a slab of ice. Ears and nose stuffed with cotton. 

Dead. What a word!! As cold and unfeeling as that slab of ice on which he lay. His face seemed "normal", as if he was asleep. We had been trying to come to grips with this for close on 24 hours, ever since we got word of his last, final attack. And yet....

Somewhere within me, I had this feeling that he would open his eyes and give us that special, goofy smile that belonged solely to him. Never happened. I was 25 when he died. Old enough to come to terms with the altered reality. That was almost 25 years back - a lifetime ago.

Today, another funeral, another set of images, also burned into the recesses of my mind. A neighbour, after a prolonged bout with cancer, passed away - she was, perhaps, in her mid forties - leaving behind a husband and two young boys. The husband, a man I've held in very high regard during the years of having come to know him well, was stoic and seemingly in control. (As was to be expected, perhaps - guilty of regional stereotyping, surely, but we Nairs/Malayalis are, typically, undemonstrative) 

The children, aged around 13 and 8 perhaps, seemed rather unmoved by the occasion, I thought - perhaps they had become acclimatised to the idea, having seen the mother struggle through pain for close on a year. Till almost to the very end, both boys seemed to have "adjusted" - at least that was what I thought, and I admired them both for their strength and fortitude. 

It was at the end, just as the body was placed on the electric crematorium's sliding rails - the elder boy perhaps realised only then that this was the point of no return. The look of pure desolation, the horror of that moment, those urgent steps that led him out from the crowd into his own lonely corner where he felt the need to be just then... 

Grief, pure & simple, is so difficult to share. It must be shouldered, all alone. He did not cry, he just shivered, trembled and gazed vacantly into a middle distance.