I would like to start by apologizing for being awol for the last month or so, here's why.
I expected to feel a lot of things in this whole quarantine situation: anger, frustration, helplessness, fatigue and stress, to name a few. One thing I never anticipated that I would feel is grief. I just never thought this would happen even in my wildest dreams. But, it did, it happened to me and this grief just took over me and brought me to my knees. It made me re-evaluate everything I believed it.
To put this into perspective, I lost my grandfather just over a month ago and even though I knew this was an eventuality at some point, I never expected it to happen now especially under the given set of circumstances. The reality of the situation made processing the grief all the more difficult. I was angry at the circumstance, at the world, at god and at him. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that we couldn’t have a funeral, that our entire family couldn’t be together at this time, that we couldn’t bury him. This all was very hard to accept for me. I thought we had time. I thought that while we were in lockdown, I’d be able to sit and spend time with him, listening to him talk about his childhood and how he fell in love with my grandmother. I really thought we had time.
It took me until a few days ago that I was being selfish in my thinking. My grandfather never wanted a big funeral, he hated being the centre of attention and all he wanted to do was spend time with us and take care of us. And funnily enough he still even now. Like when I went over to visit my grandmother the other day, she handed me a box of Cadbury Dairy Milk’s that he had broken up into squares because he knew I liked them. All it took was a box of chocolate to fix whatever I was feeling. So now I do little things that remind me of him like eat my apples with chilli powder and salt the way he loved to.
When I went to visit my grandfather in the hospital, the day before he passed away, he asked me to hold his hand and at that moment I remembered all the times he hand held my hand literally when I was growing up and learning to walk and on my way to school and figuratively like calling me up on my first day of college every year and coming to watch all my performances. Losing him has been one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to experience so far but, I know that he’s made me strong enough to survive this grief and honour his memory.
I also wrote a small poem for him that I hope to read at his memorial once this pandemic passes. Here it is.
Without you; life faded away, one sniffling phone call at a time.
Without you; I lay in bed, my mind paralyzed,
Then you appeared and held my hand.
“You’ll never be alone”.
Death is a difficult thing to handle especially in a situation like the one we are living in currently, where mourning is tough. What I've learned through this is that the strength to deal with and overcome any situation in life lies within you, you just have to give yourself the time to feel your feelings and emotions before trying to move forward.
Xoxo Erica