A colleague lost her mother to sudden diabetic coma on yesterday and I was asked to accompany the posse of office guys who were going to visit her. I declined. Amita is 26, very close to my heart and one of my most cherished team resources. Most of the office junta is dismayed that I declined to go and they write it down to my usual truculence. I only know 1 thing – if my mom had passed away without any warming, I’d be mad as hell and would want to be left absolutely alone. Don’t get me wrong – I want to see her and hold her tight but I think this is more my need than hers and this isn’t the time to impose them on her. 

Judith Warner, one of my favourite NYT columnists writes of the death of her dear friend Valerie Askolovitch in Paris and weaves in a wonderful case of how people in the West are always taught to exhibit grief with utmost patrician rigidity. Most funeral scenes from Hollywood films will showcase a host of people, immaculately dressed in black, standing close yet apart from each other, not much touching, and certainly no angry or helpless outbursts of grief. Hell, even kids as young as 11 or 15 year old hold themselves stiff with a control that is at once heartbreaking as it is terrifying. Can u imagine what such self control can do to a young teen who imagines that expressing grief would probably relegate him to the ranks of chicken shit?
I have always been uncomfortable with the extreme emotional austerity that we usually associate with the Western way of life. It’s not as if they do not care about their children, definitely not. I think it’s more to do with an endless quest for independence, the inability to learn to lean on someone else during times of extreme despair, which has led the civilization to uphold such examples of restraint and stoicism. 

While we have our own rituals of the shraddha ceremony, there is absolutely no
substitute for a good ol’ crying game in any Indian death. Strangely, food plays a much more important role in the West, at least during occasions of death, than they do in india. I do know that in Bengal we are supposed to wear white & carry tuberoses and sweets when we visit the home of the newly bereaved. But carrying casseroles, pies, meatloaves, puddings and soups, is definitely not in. 

The only such occasion that I was compelled to attend was long ago in downtown Baltimore at the home of my friend’s in-laws. Madhu had lost her 37-yr old bro-in-law and these were a family of orthodox Jews. Forget wailing or tears, the almost impregnable sense of loss that hung loose over their 6-bedroom mansion was much worse; the entire formality of polite nods and shaking hands and endless trays filled with meat pies being thrust into ur faces got so weird for us that madhu & I slunk away for a smoke mid-way through the darn thing. The whole affair was more suffocating than sad and I resented the perfect arrangements, all details attended to, and the perfect stoicism of ‘life must go on’. Damn, but life does not go on I felt like screaming. There wouldn’t be any Neville to shout arguments about the relative merits of the Yankees versus the Red Sox at the next dinner table the next day and no amount of stoicism could change that. 

Speaking of her grandfather’s funeral, Warner writes, “I would have been more at home in a family where the women, cloaked in black, had thrown themselves upon the coffin, keening, where people literally rent their garments, where they self-immolated, perhaps. That kind of intensity would, at least, have felt real to me.” 

I dunno if I agree with her for the Indian display of grief leaves much to be desired of course. I lost a very close friend in college who’d lost her dad, a famous Kolkata physician, to a sudden attack of stroke, a few days before our PG exams. While the entire class had gone to visit her, I’d stayed back. We were very close and Anin was the gal who’d taught me the pun behind the famous ‘Hyderabad Blues’ dialogue, ‘Dil pe mat le yaar, hath me le.’ We ‘d spent many a lazy afternoon lying on the grass behind the Political Science Dept, reading the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfred Sasson and Rupert Brooks and weeping unabashedly. How could this galpal of my heart not perceive that to visit her and console her would be a travesty for there cannot be any greater insult to one’s sensibilities than to mouth a bunch of crap in the face of irreversible loss? I had known her father and was terrified I’d burst into helpless tears if I saw her. How absurd would that seem? I wrote to her on yahoo and hoped we would talk someday soon. A month later when she appeared for the exams, she wished me coldly and proceeded to walk past me as if we were passing acquaintances. I tried speaking to her a few times but Anin had perceived my absence at her father’s death as an affront to our friendship. As they say, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness.” College ended and we went our different ways. Did I ever regret not going to her dad’s funeral? I really cannot say, but I do know that grief is best expressed and handled alone. Be it the stiff rigidity of the west or the wild wailing of our own shores, it is all pretty futile when u really ponder appropriate expressions of grief.

Tags: death, grief, expressions, futility, random