Listening to Grief

‘He’s gone’.

The atmospheric pressure of these two words were enough to crush my heart, inwards.

I learnt of my fathers passing in a taxi cab, after a 40-hour plane journey that took me from Western Canada to a dusty road in India. At this ‘big bang’, I did the only thing that came naturally to me: I cried. I outpoured all my grief, my loss, my vulnerability into an open casket of emotion, for all to see.

I expected to be embraced, to be held and to be safe.

I was not.

Instead, I was told to stop.

STOP CRYING


STOP CRYING


STOP CRYING


I tried to explain how I was feeling to family, yet several times that first day and for the following months, I was greeted with the same response:

STOP.

STOP.

STOP.

These words were like lashes to my body, like paper cuts to my already broken heart.
My sadness deepened as I was left bereft of anyone who could acknowledge my immense grief and sorrow.

I felt isolated and alone.

I had thought India would be the best place to process my loss, for death and all its forms is widely encompassed in Hinduism, Yoga and various sacred scriptures. There is a God of death, a philosophy that embraces reincarnation and visible cremations where ashes are immersed into holy rivers.

Having been brought up in a Hindu household in England, I had come to understand and respect these beliefs, yet the loss of my father and the pain of never being able to see or hold him again still hurt. It still does.

These feelings said my family, were due to the fact that I didn’t have a spiritual understanding of life and death. For if I truly understood that life was cyclical, then I would realise that my father had merely moved on to a better plain of existence and I would not feel this heartache.

My heart however, did still ache and the more I tried to express my grief, the more I was ridiculed. I realised that my family’s proclamations were now the rule of law and the only permissible response was to kneel down and submit to their orders.

I kept quiet, imprisoned by their beliefs.

After several months of emotional quarantine in India, I was finally able to take time out for myself. I travelled to England and began to connect with this deep loss. What I found, were people who were willing to listen. They asked how I felt and then simply sat and heard my words of pain and suffering. They delivered neither platitudes, religious guidance nor opinions on how I should feel. They all just listened.

This ability to be present to my sorrow, without judgement, was the empathetic response that helped validate my feelings: It was ok to miss my dad. It was ok to be sad. It was ok to not be ok.

Shorn from the shackles of my family’s expectations, I finally found a safe space to rest and my emotions began to release. I grieved, I cried and no one told me otherwise.

This capacity to meet me where I was at, was the antithesis of my time in India, where others had tried to move me on from my grief. This may have been done with good intent and their own faith may have helped them in making sense of their own losses, but when my family enforced this philosophy upon me, then it was less about helping, but more about reinforcing their own ego and set of beliefs.

The unconditional support I yearned for however, was my family to realise that their way of helping didn’t serve me and rather than espousing their own feelings, I needed for them to unconditionally listen to mine.

What I felt inside, was deep sadness and suffering and this contradicted my family’s beliefs, because although their faith spoke of death, what it did not speak of was loss and grief. In their culture, death and grief were contradictory terms and it’s this dichotomy that I struggled to reconcile.

The sorrow and heartache I experienced however, was not incongruent with my father’s passing, but rather borne of an understanding that death and grief are inextricably intertwined and interconnected. To have this sense of loss, was because I had loved so deeply and no sermon or doctrine could falsify these emotions that I felt, for the way we all experience death, grief and loss is our own reality. It is our own truth.

I miss my dad.

This is my truth.