During her illness, before she became bedbound, she had a chair she always sat in. I had mine too — to her right, just within her line of vision. If I moved to another seat, she would complain. Not dramatically. Just enough to let me know.
She needed to see me. After forty years, I suppose I needed to be seen.
That chair is still there. I don’t sit in it.
I used to think grief was something you went through when you lost someone very dear to you. But grief is more than that. So much more.
It’s not just losing loved ones. Grief wears many faces.
For the first two years after losing my wife, I was consumed by guilt. Guilt from being alive. Guilt from the feeling that I hadn’t done enough. Guilt from that niggling voice asking whether I could have pursued different avenues of treatment. I still feel it — to a lesser extent now — but when it resurfaces, the pain is intense. After a great deal of hard self-searching, I’ve learned to ride whatever storm comes. But it took time. It took work.
Dealing with negative thoughts, with difficult feelings, and with the grief that surrounds us in everyday life — that is no small thing.
Over the years I have lost both parents, my in-laws, and a very dear sister, who passed away soon after my wife. The recovery time from one loss to the next was very short. Other losses — work colleagues, friends, neighbours — I got through in their own separate ways. The pain varied. Some grief was short-lived; some lasted months. Why that was, I will never fully know.
So when I lost my wife, I thought it would be the same. I would deal with it. I always had.
The knot in my throat told me otherwise.
What surprised me most was this: the losses of people I had loved deeply — my parents, my sister — hadn’t broken me the way losing her did. And I don’t know why. Is it the nature of that particular love? Is it the length of a life built together? Or is grief simply too complex to be measured or compared?
I may never know. But I’ve stopped expecting it to make sense.
Those first days and weeks brought a sadness I had never experienced — one that engulfed me in ways I hadn’t thought possible. Especially when the mourners had gone home. When my son and daughter had returned to their lives. When I came back to a house so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Forty years of memories filled that silence. The laughter — always the laughter. The food choices, the clothing, the smells around the house, the TV programmes we watched together. Small things. Enormous things. The list is endless.
Just like grief.
Some days I walk past her chair and barely notice it. Other days it stops me completely. I have never moved it. I don’t think I ever will.
She needed to see me. I’m still here.
–Anil J
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