From the vortex of grief: The isolation of experience, and the connection of emotions

When this drastic event happened in my life, I experienced a bunch of emotions. Gradually, I learned to embrace the grief, inhabit the cold realm of despair, and to breathe through the hot waves of pain. But I was unprepared for the loneliness I experienced. Before, I had a bunch of people I was close to. After, I felt like I was the last human being on earth. This made me feel really depressed. What was the point of life if you had to go through your darkest moments alone? Could anyone really be there for you? Or was life a solitary journey from birth to death?

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I didn't have people who tried to support me. I did, and I still do. But very little of their support actually reached me. I felt like there was an insurmountable barrier between them and me, and no words or actions could transcend that. For instance, I would tell a friend what I had been going through, and that person would say something. I'm sure they would mean well. But when I heard it, I would flinch in pain and retreat back into my shell. Sometimes, a person would say, Oh, I know what you're going through. I lost xyz relative recently. And, in my head, I would go No, you don't. I've lost relatives too. That comes nowhere near the pain of watching your parent go through a life shattering illness. Someone would say Be positive. In my head- Easy for you to say. Walk a mile in my shoes, watch your father struggle for breath everyday, and come back and talk to me about positivity. 

And the moment someone said something like this, I'd stop opening up to them. I'd feel that it was futile, and that they could never really "get" what I was talking about. Worse still, such conversations only increased my pain, and did nothing to help me. Slowly, I excluded more and more people from my life based on their experiences. My criteria for opening up to someone got longer and longer. Only if they have a sick parent. AND only if the illness is chronic. AND only if they're doing a PhD. AND only if they're older than x years. So on and so forth. Finally, I was left with less than a handful of people who fit my criteria, and even with them, sometimes I struggled to convey what I was going through.

And so, in this cynical mindset, I set out on a multi day long expedition to sort out my dad's finances. The previous week, we had been through a harrowing experience emotionally and financially. My dad had to be put on oxygen for a few days, and the money we had planned for a month had evaporated in a week. We needed a financial runway for the next year, and I was trying to mobilize a very substantial amount.  Now, my dad had opened accounts in a number of banks, based on careful analysis of their interest rates and past performances. He was never one to put all his eggs in one basket. But he did not have the time or energy to visit all of these banks and submit the required documents to keep the accounts active. All his accounts had become dormant, and he had not even bothered to move into the digital world--he had no debit card, no internet banking, nothing other than the tattered passbooks from two decades ago. But we needed the money now, and we had to go to each and every bank and ask for help.

At this point, I resented my life. I resented my father for not having maintained his finances neatly, for not having documented anything-I didn't even know which banks or branches he had accounts in, and just finding those passbooks had taken me a day of searching. I resented my mother, for only focusing on her work, and never bothering about the rest of the stuff. Why couldn't she have asked my Dad about the state of finances? Why did she never bother about any of this? I resented how heavily this burden weighed on me, the fact that I had no siblings to share the load. Many people told me to ask them for help, but who could I really ask to go hunt in my parents' house for my Dad's passbooks? No one. Who could I ask to go to the banks and sort all of this out? No one. All those offers of help were empty, hollow words. I had to struggle, and I had to struggle alone. 

At the first bank I went to, a supposedly premier and well-known one, the manager flatly refused to help. I had a general power of attorney, a legal document that entitled me to carry out financial transactions on my Dad's behalf. Yet, that guy refused to accept it. He told me that the validity of a GPA could only be proved in court, and that he couldn't accept it. Apparently, the account holder had to come and register the GPA in good health with the bank, only then would it be considered valid. I said, Okay, forget about closing the account. Could you just take a request to issue a new debit card? Then, I can use internet banking. Here's a signed letter from my father. He again refused, saying that my Dad's signature did not match. I knew for a fact that it was an exact match. I showed him all the hospital documents, and told him to even send someone to visit the hospital and confirm. He did not budge an inch. He told me I empathize with you as a person, but I cannot do anything to help you. This is why we ask our customers to keep everything activated and in place. I was furious. He saw me as a problem case, and he just didn't want to get involved. What good was his empathy? Clearly, here was yet another person who could not understand my world. Who had such a privileged life that he could not fathom my pain, my grief and struggles. I walked away, losing all faith in human beings as a whole.

The next day, I summoned my willpower to visit more banks, and my mother accompanied me. We booked a cab, and set out. Bank after bank, my experience was similar. People yelled at me for not having maintained the account, for not having submitted documents, for everything they could think of. I swallowed my tears and anger, and listened silently. I had always maintained my finances so meticulously, and now I was subjected to this. How unfair could life be? I hated even talking about my dad's condition, but I was forced to do exactly that. Beg, and appeal to people. Parade my pain for everyone to see, and then take these arrows of insults they shot at me. And when we came back to the cab, my Mom expressed her agony. We led such a respectable life, and now we are out on the streets like this, going from bank to bank and closing accounts. The driver asked for the next destination, and he asked it in my mother tongue. I hated him at that moment. For having deprived us of even this tiniest privacy. He had understood everything my Mom had said. I looked at him. He was very young, scruffy and untidy, possibly unwashed. Again I thought to myself, What could he know of our pain?

This person drove us around from morning till 4pm, when the banks closed. We didn't even have lunch, our sense of hunger dulled by so much else. Finally, I dropped off my Mom at the hospital, and I watched her walk in wearily. I typed in the final stop as my home, my eyes clouded by unshed tears. The driver in front did not made eye contact, but asked me in the language we shared What happened? I don't know why, but I told him everything that had happened. How my tiny family had been shattered by this, and how none of us had any happiness or peace left in life. How that hospital was both our place of despair and hope. 

His response shook me so much. He said I understand. I have a brain related disease too. When they first diagnosed it, I couldn't move my arm, talk or eat. I was hospitalized for a month. I went to a government hospital, so the treatment was free, but I am struggling just to afford the pills. I have to take these medicines my entire life, three pills every day. They are very expensive, and sometimes I try skipping one to save money. But the symptoms come back, and I can't function. So now, even though it costs so much, and most of my income is spent on medicines, I take them. They say a surgery could cure me, but both my family and I are scared. After this, he suggested other hospitals that he thought would be helpful for my Dad. He tried to offer me words of courage and hope. 

Of all the people I knew, this person was probably the one who was most different from me. Superficially, I shared nothing other than my mother tongue with him. Yet, he had not hesitated to share his deepest struggles with me. Unlike me, he didn't think What would this person understand of my life? She is privileged enough to afford a cab, and the treatment for her Dad too. All she has to do is close his bank accounts. 

I found a powerful moment of connection with another human being in that moment, and my shell of isolation cracked open. True, I could not understand this man's pain, I could not even fathom it. I had never lived through an illness like his, and I did not feel like the thread holding me to life was a fragile handful of pills. I did not have to struggle to make ends meet. Yet, despite all our differences, we resonated with each others' suffering. 

I laughed at the irony that I was writing this blog to offer support to someone else who read these words. Of course, they would have experiences which widely differed from mine. If I couldn't get support from people who had different experiences, how would anyone benefit from my words? 

I realized that I was being foolish in excluding people based on their life experiences. No one would have walked a mile in my shoes, because that is what makes my life uniquely mine. But life is weird that way. It takes our infinitely varied experiences, and maps them to a finite number of emotions. And if I changed my perspective from Has this person been through situation xyz? to Has this person felt pain, grief or sorrow? I would automatically find that connection I was missing, even in the most unlikely of people or places. For which of us can boast of a life without difficulty? And who was I to quantify pain? How could I refuse to talk to someone because I thought their pain was too little compared to mine? 

And just like that, I stumbled upon an answer to one of my fundamental questions on pain and suffering. What was the point of it? I asked life this question relentlessly, day in and day out. The point is to see ourselves in others, and lend them our support, in whatever ways we can. We may never find someone who understands exactly what we're going through. But we don't need clones of ourselves to understand what we are feeling. We share our emotions with the rest of the human population, and that is enough to connect us. All of us have to fight our battles at the end of the day. Alone. We cannot bear someone else's burdens for them, nor they ours. But we can certainly hold someone's hand and make that solitary journey a little less difficult for them. Suffering is the first step on this path. Only when we suffer do we truly understand, and learn to see beyond ourselves. 

The wound is indeed the place where light enters us.