It connects us all, the Pain!

I had watched 2 of Sushant Singh Rajput’s movies and may have stumbled upon an interview or two. Had never really noticed his infectious smile or his innocent eyes, nor was I aware of the absolute genius he was. Sunday afternoon came with the news of his alleged suicide and thud! I wouldn’t accept it. I could feel my heart sink and the stomach rumble, he was so young and successful and (seemed) happy! To worsen things, in about less than an hour while I was still checking on the information around SSR’s death, my closest friend here called me to inform about a freak accident that had killed her young, successful, father-of-two, nephew. I felt numb. The details I heard kept painting pictures in the mind and kept hurting. And, while the heart was still trying to ease the ache and the migraine was bettering a little, we lost 20 brave soldiers at the country’s northern border. It had become unbearable by then. The throbbing. The heaviness. The choke. I had never met any of those people; I never will.  And yet the loss of their lives stirred something in me that feels like grief. It has been there all through this week.

It was thus that I decided to write this piece down. This is a restoration of sorts. To tell myself, it is Okay! Why do few of us grieve and feel profound sadness for people we do not know or in the wake of a tragedy that has no direct connection to our lives?

We grieve because we are human and have hearts that are capable of feeling a deep connection to other beings and things in life.  We all have our own stories and whether direct or otherwise, we can at times relate. Grief is personal but it is also in its own way universal. Sudden and untimely deaths cause tremendous amounts of distress. In such times, our minds take imaginary trips into realms where it feels like we have lost someone near to us when we read about the deaths of strangers.  So some part of the loss we feel when we learn of death of a stranger has to do with that – the imagined loss. But underneath, even that imagined loss is true loss – subtle but palpable.

Our mind subconsciously but rather instantly establishes correlations to fulfil the need to rationalize; just in case. The ubiquitous cruel practice of favouritism/nepotism that I have seen at various workplaces, my own two children, who are the world to me and the endless stories of ultimate heroism that I have heard while growing up in an armed forces’ household! These were a few parallels that my mind drew in these recent occurrences to connect me to the pain!

We all (middle-aged people) have experienced enough grief – our own and that of the people we are connected to. We know its pull, its wide range of manifestations, its uncontrollable ache and its delicate tenderness.  Although this grief of a stranger’s death feels almost miniscule in relation to the grief we have experienced when we have lost someone close to us, it is undeniable! The reality of the circumstances, the causes and the motives involved, take away a part of our belief. We lose a tiny bit of faith, spirit, and Hope. We lose another layer of naivety. That is the experience of loss. We do lose together!

Sometimes weary of being in the state, I long for moments of ignorance, times of respite from the consistent sadness that can creep into my life the more aware I remain of the world around me. Sometimes I wish for that state of not-knowingness when I imagined that until there was a full-fledged war (which is very unlikely today), no soldier would die; when I believed that nobody would be harmed by someone walking on the road groundlessly; when I was certain that a child was indeed a child in everyone’s eye and hence could not be harmed; when I did not associate teenagers attending a party with possible damage or hurt; and when I trusted that we all were serving our older people better and taking care of one another better.

However, consciously I do not want to go back to that state ever. None of us should. We must discover the pain and work towards preventing the recurrence of the causes. Today, as we lose our fellow humans each day to an appalling disease, we become more aware that each of us is united to our collective group of humans, all 7 billion of us, in ways we can perceive but never fully understand.  Loss is one of the fiercest ties that connect us. Because death and loss weave together this fabric of humanity in which each of us is a vibrant and needed thread, there really can be no death of a stranger!

It largely may appear that most people upon encountering such incidents exhibit other emotions like feelings of anger, resentment, devastation and guilt. Not grief! However, there is more. The anger, devastation, and outrage are much like topsoil; they are easy to see and right there clearly displayed. But, underneath those intensely tangible reactions, though, there is something else.  There is a deep ground of loss.  If we remain focused on the top layers of emotions and never dig deeply down below them, we may not even know that loss is there – that is, in fact, forms the very foundation for all those other experiences and emotions.  This loss deserves to be unearthed and explored.

And when explored, we can use such tragedy to pull us into ever deeper levels of compassion – compassion for parents who lose their children, for children who long for freedom and escape, for the incomplete families of our soldiers, for the harmless introvert at workplace, for the bikers who just wish to feel the wind in the face and for each of us who makes a horrible mistake that affects the lives of others.

The mind keeps going back to the people left behind that must now find a way to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives that will never be the same.  Emotions well up from deep inside knowing that devastated families must now plan funerals for their loved ones and prepare to do the unthinkable; say goodbye.

Tragedy serves as a brutal reminder of our immortality and in reality, life does not come with any guarantees.  Life can be forever changed in one single second and sadly, those changes in life sometimes come without the chance to say goodbye. We grieve because at some level, we know it could have been our own child, spouse, sibling, teammate or friend.

We have no control over some of the tragic things that happen in our own lives nor can we change the horrible and heartbreaking things that happen to strangers that we have never met and will never know. But, we can take a stand and with courage join hands with others in faith and unrelenting hope.  We can fight to bring change. We can take a vow to choose our words carefully and to never leave the house or go to bed mad. We choose to be Kind! Take nothing for granted and appreciate every moment we are blessed to live. We do not know when it will be our last.

Lastly, we can make a promise to ourselves and to those that we love. We can say ‘I love You’ more, hug often and make every moment count.

Love and so many prayers!

💖💖💖