Reflections of a restless eccentric

 Acceptance is something I have struggled with a lot in the past 3.5 years after my Dad's stroke. Somewhere around last year, I fully accepted this event in my life. I made my peace with it. I even saw it as a blessing. I was able to appreciate how this seemingly catastrophic event forced me to take a long hard look at my life and make changes. It was the beginning of a new life for me, and as difficult as the journey was, I feel truly grateful for all of it. To say that it has been transformative is an understatement. I have grown into a much kinder, wiser and peaceful human being, and I see that it is not possible to get here without going through what I went through. However, the other side of the acceptance coin still haunts me. How could I accept this event for my father? He was a strong, able, happy person before. And after, it was like the light went out in him. He became a chronically ill, depressed, anxious person, constantly screaming, struggling and in pain. One of my fu...

It has been three years since that fateful evening in 2021 when my father had a stroke. It is not the stroke itself that I struggled with, but all that it unearthed. It felt like a churning of the seas, and so much good and bad came out of it. Things I had never known, things I had never been aware of, things I had taken for granted, and so much more. As more and more stuff surfaced, I felt overwhelmed by the furor. It was almost as if I couldn't breathe, as if I was drowning in the turbulence. I felt an intense need to work on myself, to understand who I really was, and what I was meant to do in this world. It has been three years since I embarked on that quest, and it has changed how I look at the world in so many ways. As one of my favorite poets T. S. Eliot says:  We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. Today, I write about one of the things I have struggled with the most i...

 The past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. I've been navigating a demanding PhD program with an entire universe of ups and downs, watching my dad go through a stroke, sink into being paralyzed and bedridden, and then inhabit the universe of chronic pain and illness. Last year, my grandfather joined him in the chronically ill world, and I look back and see a blur of health scares, hospital admissions and grief. My parental home resembled a hospital, with sick people (two) outnumbering the healthy (one), and my Mom as the primary caregiver to both her husband and her father. We lost my grandfather a few months ago, and now my father seems to be teetering on the edge of sanity. I won't even get into all the other things that have been going on in the family. This alone is enough to shake and uproot a person and drive them insane. If I am here today, still continuing my PhD and holding on to my sanity and health, I have primarily one person to thank. My am...

Over these past three years, anxiousness has been my almost constant but unacknowledged companion. It never felt too severe to hamper my functioning, and I always brushed it off. It's been a stressful week. Maybe I've had too much caffeine, it's just jitters. I have had too little sleep for a while now, my nervous system is shot. Given my schedule and life, all these are very plausible and likely explanations for how I felt. And so, I continued on, finding coping mechanisms to deal with the bad days - no caffeine, meditation and breathing exercises, long walks.  A few months back, in May, I was preparing to leave for a summer in Amherst. This would be my first time living alone abroad for a few months, and I was definitely nervous about it. My husband had to travel ahead of me, which meant that I also had the responsibility of cleaning and winding up the house before I left. Added to this, I had a paper deadline a few hours before I left, which meant I would get little to n...

 Grief is a very non-linear journey, and I have known this for a very long time. Yet, each time I inhabit one of those black holes of loss, sorrow, worry and gloom, I forget this fact. Today is one such day, and I am writing this to remind myself and anyone else who may need this.  I woke up today, feeling an intense sorrow. It took me completely by surprise, because nothing had "happened". I'd gone to bed last night feeling pretty normal, and yet I woke up feeling utterly sad. I racked my brain. Did I eat too much sugar? Was I having a delayed reaction to something that happened a while ago? I couldn't find a logical reason for my sadness, except that everything that had been going on suddenly added up and descended upon me today. I sighed and sat down. I thought about my grandfather's death, my dad's continued illness for almost three years now, and so many other tragedies before that. The tears started rolling down.  This has been a very familiar experience...

 I am woken up at 4.25am by a phone call. Initially, I think that it is someone from India who is not aware that I'm in a different timezone. I groggily take a look at my phone. It is my husband. My heart skips a beat because I know too well what it likely means when a loved one calls you in the wee hours of the morning. He says Thatha is no more. I'm driving over to your parents' . I am numb, still waking up, and only shock registers. So many questions come to mind. When? How? Why? The answers reach me from a distance. He passed away in his sleep in the morning. Around 11am. And thus begins the horror of losing another loved one. The last grandparent I had. The one I knew the most. And the one I shared a house with for more than 20 years. And then the aftershocks hit me. I am continents away, and the logistical issues in traveling back home are too many. I will not go, and I will never get to see him again. I will never get to say goodbye. And so, I turn to writing, hopin...

 Loss comes in different colors. It may be that something tangible we possess is taken from us. It could be something or someone we always imagined as a part of our lives leaving. It could be relationships that sour over time. But the hardest part is finding acceptance. Not just of what happened, but all the voids created in our present and perceived future as a result of this event. When my Dad had a stroke, I looked at it as a transient event. That he would get better in a few months, maybe a year. After that, things would go back to how they were. Over time, gradually, I realized that this was not going to happen. He got worse, and all the negative traits he had became magnified. I saw depression take hold of him with a vengeance, and his anxiety ratcheted to the highest I'd ever seen it. He lives every day in agony, screaming continuously for the most part. Every other week, a physical ailment crops up, adding to all our burdens. Sometimes I look at him in disbelief. I can no l...

 For almost two years now, my narrative has been centered around outrage and grief at what my life has become. I went into great detail explaining how difficult, sad and horrifying it was to go through this journey. I truly did not know how to deal with this, let alone move on from it. I retreated from social life and spent most of my time alone. After a while, I realized something I had known all along but stubbornly refused to acknowledge: Life throws challenges at everyone. Maybe at different points in time, or in different ways. But my life was by no means an exception. After I had fully come to terms with this, I was curious to learn more about how people processed such experiences and what I could learn from them. In this series, I hope to share with my Reader anecdotes from my journey of healing and hope.  I bought a button rose plant in early June this year. I have had rose plants before, but this one surpassed the best I have ever had. It flowered 2-3 times a week, a...

 I write this on your birthday. There's so much on my mind that I haven't said to you. I don't know if I'll ever say all this to you, because being honest and being cruel don't seem very different at this point. But there's also all the love I have for you, and I find myself feeling this strange mixture of emotions - love, sorrow, pain, grief and hatred. I write this as much for me as for anyone else, as a catharsis from the intensity of watching a parent go through chronic illness and deterioration. Whenever I call, I hear your screams in the background. I hear the constant pain, the panic, and anxiety. The shrieks of a tortured soul existing. Not living, but merely existing, every moment spent so agonizingly. I genuinely feel sad for you, but I feel sadder for Mom. 'For better or worse, in sickness and in health' sounds glorious during a wedding, but surely there must be a limit to the worse and the sickness? How does one live with a spouse who not onl...

Guilt has been a big part of my life for the past 1.5 years. Talking about it often brought up more guilt, and therefore I used to avoid it entirely. But eventually, living with it became harder, and I had to confront it and process it. Writing about it is one of the first things I wanted to do, and here I am. The guilt started from the very first moment of my father's stroke. I knew he was depressed. I should have done something. I should have definitely visited more often. Or at least called more often. He must have really missed me after I got married. I was filled with these thoughts, and my guilt was so extreme that I felt partly responsible for his stroke. In one of the most empathetic emails I have ever received, a dear friend told me the guilt was not mine to bear. Although I heard and remembered her words, I could not find relief. A few days later, as the financial crisis started to hit, I felt guilty about more things: I shouldn't have quit that job. My parents would ...

“Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words  And never stops at all           - Emily Dickinson One of the most intimidating things about this year was managing all of my parents' finances and chores along with my work and personal responsibilities. No matter how well I planned, something came up out of the blue at the last minute. My mom would tell me a day or two before the deadline and I would have to somehow accommodate it in my schedule and get it done. The fact that it was always unfamiliar stuff coupled with broken and badly designed websites and apps made it no easier on me. Dealing with this put a lot of pressure on me, and I despised it for taking away that last bit of control I thought I had over my life.  Among many such incidents, my mom once called telling me that my dad's chartered accountant license was due for renewal in the next two days and that he wanted it done. As usual, I h...

It has been a year since the day of my father's stroke. A year that feels like a lifetime. A lifetime of pain, worry and grief. As a habitual overthinker, I wonder, apart from being on this insane emotional roller-coaster, is there anything that I have learnt from all this? Anything I can say that might be remotely helpful to someone else navigating choppy waters? And that's how I ended up writing this. When something goes awry in a big way, it is natural to feel sad, worried or afraid. There is nothing wrong with this, and it is perfectly fine to feel these emotions.  But what I think is completely avoidable is the struggles that come out of our ideas of fairness and how our lives should play out. For a long time, I have known that life is not fair. Consciously, I'd never even expected life to be fair to me. But I've spent many a day in misery because somehow, I still felt angry and betrayed and upset. For instance, I'd feel very triggered when I met relatives or f...

Sometime last month, I was going home from my lab late at night. I'd usually make a minute of small talk with whoever was at the security desk while I signed in or out everyday, and this happened that night as well. It was well past midnight, so the guard asked me how I'd go home at this hour. (With the current state of affairs in India, this seems like a reasonable question to ask a woman. Reasonable, but sad.) I reassured him that I stayed close by and that I'd be fine.  His next question took me by surprise. Do you have kids? I replied in the negative. His forehead crinkled, and his expression became gloomy. That's so sad. This is such a big sacrifice you're making to be here. Women always have it tough. He tutted in dismay. When I heard his response, my stream of thoughts went like this: Why is he sad that I don't have a kid? I am perfectly happy not having one. In fact, considering how much I have on my plate currently, I am extremely thankful that I don...

In his famous and disruptive work David and Goliath , Malcolm Gladwell attempts to upturn several notions on disadvantages. One of the interesting ideas he introduces the reader to is the difference between being 'a big fish in a small pond' and being 'a small fish in a big pond'. He argues that for most people, the former may be a more fulfilling choice. He provides an example of a student choosing grad schools to further this theory. He makes the point that this student who might be well above average might end up in the bottom of her class if she chooses one of the world's best schools, and that this might be severely demotivating and hamper her long term prospects. In contrast, if she chooses a not-so-famous college, she might end up in the top of her class, and that might bolster her confidence and enable her to succeed long term. Therefore, he argues that there is little meaning in choosing something because of the prestige/name. In this article, I attempt to ...

Recently, my mother told me ever so casually that a close relative was suspected of having cancer and that she was waiting for her biopsy results. Knowing my mother, I knew she was devastated by this news, but she carried on with the charade of being unaffected. I too responded in kind, and asked only technical questions, as if we were discussing a hypothetical person and it didn't mean anything to either of us. What are the implications of this prognosis? What are the treatment options available? How long would recovery be? Are secondaries common in this form of cancer?  We continued this way for about an hour, never touching upon how we 'felt' on hearing this, skirting around it like a minefield. But when I put the phone down, I had no doubts about what either of our reactions were. We were deeply worried and upset, and she was more close to devastated. I could not sleep, and lay in bed endlessly pondering over this piece of foreboding news. Today, I think if I should rea...