The blind men and an elephant*

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme

What do you do with grief and loss? Do you hold it in your hands and sit with it? Do you throw it as far away as you can and hope it doesn’t find its way back to you? How much does it weigh?

Who and what are you allowed to grieve and how much? For how long?

When is it okay to move on with your life and is death the only kind of grief? What does it mean to “move on?”

I ask because I don’t know.

Grief and loss confound me. I never know how to react, respond to the person dealing with it directly. What is proper, to say, to do. I manage to do okay but I never think it’s good enough. I could have said more, done more, I’ll tell myself later. I could have, should have done things differently. All the rules which apply to not using those tones and phrases when talking to yourself somehow just don’t hold up in the face of one of life’s biggest certainties, in one of its most natural events.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Death, like divorce and disease, makes people awkward and scared and uncomfortable, like when you’re a child and afraid of the dark, you’d rather close your eyes and wish it away than stare it down.

Do you feel grief in your heart or in your head too? Where does it live? Is it resident or does it rent? Is it called heartbreak? A headache? How is this pain different from other times?

Do you feel it viscerally in other parts of your body in ways you can’t put in words? What colour is it? What does it smell like? Does it taste of anything? Can you touch it?

Is it tall, is it short? Is it dry, wet? Can you wrap your arms around it? Put in in your pocket?

Does it hang like a cloud or spread like a smell? Does it stay stationary or follow you around?

Mourning the passing of a pet is understandable. But how do you mourn the end of an era?

There’s more vocabulary now around how the end of a romantic relationship can feel similar to losing a loved one to death. But we’ve still got so much further to go when talking about the end of a friendship.

Difficult as it is, you can say goodbye to a person. How do you say goodbye to a place — the house you grew up in, a city you fell in love with, a time in your life when you were a certain person who you no longer are?

It’s a strange time to be talking about death especially when this past year has felt like it has lurked around every corner. Is death something you can ever escape when it’s coming for you? Can you ever really prepare for it?

What exactly are we sad about when we grieve?

Hope and possibility?

Pain and suffering?

Time?

People of different cultural traditions have different ways to cope and rituals to make sense of loss.

Sitting Shiva in Judaism.

Iddat in Islam.

Day of the Dead.

Wearing black.

Wearing white.

Flowers and food.

Song and dance.

Why is the death of a parent so different from the death of a child?

What does time do to how we remember someone?

When you learn of things after someone’s passing which makes you wonder if you knew them at all, what do you with that?

I don’t know many things about death. But what I do know is this:

Death is personal and shared.

Death is private and public.

Death is individual and universal.

What are your thoughts?**

Here are some “death resources” (gosh, that’s morbid), like these Disney movies from two very different times, who for how much business the brand does with smiles and fairy dust, also does a stellar job of explaining death in all its nuance to young children, without scaring them, in full colour.

1. The Lion King (1994) — if there ever was a classic

2. Coco (2017)

You can watch both with a subscription on Disney Plus.

I recently watched Awkwafina (who I love) on The Farewell, where she plays a granddaughter saying goodbye to her dying grandma. It isn’t dark. It’s slow and quiet and uneventful and sudden, much like what the death of an older person in real life is sometimes like. I loved the pace and like Crazy Rich Asians, it was so good to see a story built for mainstream cinema around a family that isn’t white or brown (Originally Amira’s thought, which I agree with). Directed and produced by Lulu Wang and available to watch on Amazon Prime.

Also on Amazon Prime is not this story of death per se but more of waiting for it and of decay and not having your priorities right. Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurrana are great in their roles in Gulabo Sitabo, which comes with subtitles, written by Juhi Chaturvedi.

And on Netflix, Waiting came up, which I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did as Naseeruddin Shah and Kalki Koechlin navigate difficult choices on behalf of loved ones in a hospital in sleepy Kochi. Directed by Anu Menon, who co-wrote with Atika Chohan and James Ruzicka.

I’ve got Little Big Women queued, which just dropped on Netflix, about a family dealing with the death of an estranged father.

I’m linking to this organisation because it seems like such a simple, novel idea, so widely needed but not nearly as widely available. Founded by two women who experienced loss and couldn’t find the support they wished they had, Untangle helps with the many logistics and emotional chaos that descends on people following the death of a loved one.

I loved When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi because how do you not love a book about dying written by a man who is dying who describes not just the emotional experience but also breaks down the raw physicality of it because he understands what’s happening to his body so intimately as a trained neurosurgeon? Family Life by Akhil Sharma is still a favourite of the genre for how honest it is about a family living through a tragedy.

As much as I wish you never have to deal with death, we all will someday. But reaching out to someone experiencing death closely no matter how much you’d love to avoid it or how long it’s been since you spoke to them or sometimes even how angry you might be with them is almost always a good idea. Just like Shubnum Khan says in this tweet. Because

Death is isolating and frightening whoever you are.

I’ll end with Poorna Bell, who is also often a hoot on Twitter, because I don’t know anyone else who writes as extensively and elegantly about the many parts of death, coping and survival in the face of losing someone you love. Her husband died by suicide after battling with a heroin addiction and her heartbreak as well as resilience shines clear in all she does.

No one has the answers. The kindness shown when someone is freefalling in the abyss caused by death (even if they deny it. Especially if they deny it) will not be for nothing. Let’s normalise talking about death, talking to our children about death to help them understand it just like we’d explain something like photosynthesis to them, as much to help them process it as to help ourselves. What you do in these moments in life will say plenty about you so try to do the right thing even if it’s not the easy thing. And you will know the difference. As long as you’re doing that, whatever you do will be just fine.

Wishing you health and happiness for all of your days and of all you hold close,

xx

AA

*This week’s headline comes from the story of the blind men and an elephant. Each man, who has never seen an elephant, comes in contact with one part of the animal’s body and tries to describe it to the others based only on what he touches. Figuring out death feels a bit like that. The line beneath it are lyrics from a song in Disney’s, “Beauty and the Beast” and seemed fitting.

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