Realignment

This post is intended to be experienced as an audio recording – click here to listen. Or, if you prefer, you can find the transcript below.

Traces of you
Linger like a tear drop
(Fresh upon the air) My heart sings for you
Play me like a rain cloud
Sounds upon the air

Traces of You - Anouskha Shankar & Norah Jones
(listen to the full song here)

I dedicate this song to my father, Kaukutla Venkat Reddy. When I heard this song performed live at London’s Southbank Centre, the artist explained she was halfway through writing it when her own father had passed away – and so the lyrics took on a whole new meaning. And that night, she was also dedicating the song to all of those we had lost in India in the brutal second wave of the pandemic.

My heart, still in a million pieces, swelled and collapsed again as I closed my eyes and thought of my Dad, who left this world all too suddenly on 1st March last year. At the same time I felt a deep ache in resonance with the other friends and family we had lost, and the devastation and suffering in India. I choked back tears as the sitar strings reverberated throughout the concert hall, but with it I felt my grief being witnessed and that I was witnessing the grief of so many others back home.

So what does it mean to witness another’s grief? In this grief illiterate society that we live in, where death is a taboo that no one wants to talk about, and, let’s face it, most people feel really awkward about what to say or do when someone they know has lost a loved one, how can we truly show up for those who we care about? That’s something I’ll come back to this in the second part of this blog post.

But first and foremost, how can we attend to our own grief? How we can we start to deal with the void in our life and grieve fully so that eventually we grieve with more love than pain? Contrary to what you may think, the grief never goes away and it doesn’t get smaller…but we grow and wrap ourselves around it, embracing it as part of our new identity.

There is one certainty in this life, and that is one day you are going to die. Your death rate and the death rate of every single living being around you is 100% – FACT. Speaking from my own experience of losing one of the most important people in my life, I can tell you this much – grief is messy, isolating and lonely. In fact I reflected to my grief counsellor that I didn’t feel at all isolated in 2020 when the pandemic hit, but I have never felt so isolated than after my father’s death. He was my rock, my mentor, my safe place. Losing this primal relationship turned my world upside down – it felt like an earthquake had hit and devastated everything I’ve ever known.

What people don’t tell you is that as well as losing this incredible human being , and feeling the most intense emotional pain that you could never have imagined, everything else seems to fall apart around you. That person may have been the “glue” that held everything together, and for sure, at this point in time, no one else is rushing to become the glue…in fact you’re not even sure if that’s a role you want to take on.

The truth is, your grief is yours and yours alone. It is a grief that only you understand because your relationship with the person who is gone was and is completely different to anyone else’s.

I learned the hard way that when you’re in someone else’s grief and carrying the weight of their grief, it means your own grief goes unattended. At one point, I had sharp pains in my chest and my heart physically hurt. The only thing that got me through it was doing a 10 minute breathing meditation on the hour every hour.

Almost one year on, and I’m still trying to find my centre. Grief has no timeline. The only thing we can do is to allow ourselves to grieve and heal on our own terms. No matter what the pain, suffering or injury, the process of healing gifts us the opportunity to reset, to reconstruct, rebalance and realign.

For me, connecting with nature has been a really powerful healing tool. When my friends asked what I would like for my birthday, knowing full well that they couldn’t actually give me what I wanted which was to have my Dad back, I asked if they would contribute towards a stay at a nature reserve. A professor of Hinduism who I was studying under last year suggested that when we desire to get out and experience nature, we are in fact looking to connect with God, because how else could we experience such total peace and perfection.

I most recently experienced this about a month ago on a Sunday morning when sitting out on the terrace of my apartment in Goa. Surrounded by lush coconut palms and sapota trees, the monkeys had come out to play and were merrily leaping from palm to palm. A mother was cradling her baby protectively on a nearby tree, while one of the more adventurous ones scuttled right past me onto the adjacent roof, where it sat munching on a piece of sapota. We looked at each other curiously, but respecting each other’s space. In the distance, eagles and kites were circling and swooping majestically over the treetops. Completely immersed in this perfect dance and harmony of living beings, I felt my Dad’s presence all around me. Tears of pure bliss streamed down my face as I connected with this energy, this consciousness.

Whilst not every moment of healing is quite as beautiful as this, it’s true that the person you loved remains within your heart and soul. And you can stay connected to them for the rest of your life, carrying them with you. It’s really ok to hold onto a couple of items of theirs, have conversations with them, and visit places where you feel close to them. You are not necessarily pathological just because you do this – it might be through food they liked, smells, ceremonies, music or even what made them laugh. And it was through the music, dance and food that he loved, that we celebrated my Dad’s life at his shradhanjali (homage) in our hometown, Hyderabad.

And it may even be unconscious at first, but somewhere on a much deeper level, the connection is strong enough to surface. Last summer, I took a course on Bhakti Yoga which is all about the path an individual takes to lovingly devote themselves to God so they can achieve oneness with him. I came across it in the usual way – it popped up on one of my social media feeds alongside many other ads, but for some reason I felt strongly drawn to it and was compelled to sign up. My Dad was a devout Hindu, who could read and speak Sanskrit and he would regularly do prayers and rituals at home and in others homes, and read the Bhagavad Gita daily. So whilst I was accustomed to the rituals, it wasn’t until I started studying that I fully understood WHY my Dad did all these things, and I instantly felt closer to him. And it wasn’t until six months later, when preparing for my father’s shradhanjali in Hyderabad, that I discovered that his favourite chapter in the Gita was Chapter 12 – which is all about Bhakti Yoga.

Rituals are a big part of the grieving process in Hinduism. In December, I travelled to India with my family so we could finally bring my Dad home. On arriving in Hyderabad, nothing felt the same and nothing was the same – and nor will it ever be. As we drove past the Irani chai shop my Dad had taken me to the last time he’d collected me from the airport, I sighed deeply and my heart sank.

Around a week later, along with my mother, uncle, aunts, and a close family friend, we travelled to Varanasi (also known as Kashi or Banaras) to immerse my Dad’s ashes in the River Ganges. We left our hotel around 6.30am on a misty Sunday morning and en route there was the obligatory almost-breakdown of our auto rickshaw! The last part of the journey involved traipsing through a myriad of back alleys to reach the banks of the Ganga, and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself when I knew for a fact my Dad would be saying “Why are you bringing me to this dirty place?!”

Traditionally, it would always be a male who would perform these kinds of rituals, but thankfully the priest was open-minded enough to allow me to do the ceremony. He stressed that not everyone who wants to go to Kashi makes it there, and the fact that we had travelled so far was testament to the fact that we had been guided and we were meant to be there. After concluding the prayers for both my Dad and our ancestors, we boated out into the river, and it was there that I laid his ashes to rest in the water – back to nature, back to the Source or as one friend described it, accompanying his transition to his “new life” as pure consciousness – one with God. And it was only when I reflected on it in that way, that I too found some stillness and peace. The late Thích Nhất Hạnh encapsulated this beautifully in his book “No Death, No Fear”. He wrote:

“This body is not me; I am not caught in this body, I am life without boundaries, I have never been born and I have never died. Over there the wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies all manifests from the basis of consciousness. Since beginningless time I have always been free. Birth and death are only a game of hide-and-seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave goodbye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before. We shall always be meeting again at the true source. Always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.”