Dealing with grief: Will I ever feel happy again?

One year ago, on April 13, it was a bright and warm Eid day in my native city of Karachi. There, in the early hours of a deceptively unassuming Saturday morning, nestled in my brother’s arms, our mother took her last breath.

Flashback: My sister and I get the news through a mix of WhatsApp messages and phone calls, that same call that everyone living far away from family lies awake dreading. As Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her book Notes on Grief, “The news is like a vicious uprooting.” I am in shock but manage to post a Facebook update and field a few condolence calls and messages, looking at them as though “through a mist”: “So sorry for the loss of your mother”, “may your mother’s soul rest in peace”, “I loved her sense of humour, she’ll be deeply missed”. Whose mother? I impassively observe my husband book flights for us, slowly change into the only white shalwar kameez that I have, explain to our girls that we’ll be back before they know it, get into the car and prepare to board a flight feared by so many immigrants. Once we are on the plane, I peek outside the window, watch the aircraft taxi on the runway and think, “Is any of this real, am I flying to Karachi for my mother’s funeral?” — I guess I am having a kind of out-of-body experience. The typically short flight feels suffocating, a more stretched out journey than usual, but mostly — and as is often the case in crisis — my senses have shut down.

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The first days back in Abu Dhabi are tender and painful, until a hefty numbness sets in. I am functioning — going to work, tending to the girls and the house, attempting casual social conversations— but it is only when I sit down to write that I come to face-to-face with a loss that is so hard-hitting, it is difficult to fully fathom its implications. 

Time can’t heal everything

As we approach the one-year mark, it almost serves as a reminder that mourning time is up, as if we are losing the legitimacy to grieve her much longer.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare reminds us that “Well, everyone can master a grief but he that has it.” This last year has evidenced this to me in unfamiliar yet emphatic ways — our society is not adequately equipped to cope with the idea of death. Perhaps it is not possible to fully relate to the ache and longing caused by the loss of a loved one. Often, there is not much one can think of to say; after all, what words could possibly make someone feel better? 

Sometimes, what rankles less are the more banal messages: a simple, “I’m sorry.” Other times, we overcompensate, don pragmatic hats and try to rationalise the loss — it’s happened for a reason that might not reveal itself instantly. Dark distortions, discomforting, anguishing, gloomy wounded attachments; grief is all this and so, we try to hurry up the grieving process, we stamp on it a sell-by date and assume we are doing a service by expecting people to simply “get over it” and “move on”.

The rasping news is that people will not snap back to their old selves — if anything, the experience of loss will change them in profound and lasting ways. Whilst the iron grip of grief may quietly recede, things will never be the same. As a society, we need to accept this reality, talk about death and loss, and become comfortable with the discomfort.

A couple of years ago, David French wrote about how he had avoided a close friend’s hospitalised father, simply because he didn’t quite know how to deal with his friend’s pain. Once the father died, French showed up at the funeral and that’s when his friend asked him: “Where were you?” In that moment, French realised his mistake. “I had violated the first commandment of friendship: presence. Simply being there... I couldn’t pass even that one test.”

The truth is that we are never really finished with grief. This translates into accepting that walking alongside someone’s grief will take courage and constancy. A degree of intentionality too, the willingness to sometimes simply hold space, with the acknowledgement that grief is not a problem that can be covered up, trouble-shooted and neatly resolved. It is a messy process that has to be embodied and lived through and eventually, while one doesn’t “move on”, perhaps you “move forward”; while you don’t “get over it” perhaps you can “get on with it”.

We have all jostled with the dilemma of how to interact with someone who is grieving, how to avoid saying stilted things, to instead try and cure them so that things can quickly revert to fun and “normal”, so that we can go back to knowing them as we once did. While well intended, this is a poor way of thinking, for woven into the loss is a new normal that has to be tended to and accepted. It is not so much that the mourning is over, but that a reshuffled new beginning has started.

As I reflect on this past year — much of which has felt like baptism through fire — I realise that grief, as Adichie puts it, “is a cruel kind of education… You learn how ungentle mourning can be...You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”

I also learn that grief is not only painful, it can be frighteningly lonely too. At such a time, the power of reaching out, even if to say nothing, cannot be underestimated. Finding the right words can follow later.

Saba Karim Khan is the author of Skyfall and works at NYU Abu Dhabi.