Last Christmas

and the present amongst grief, loss & death

From the window of my single room, sitting on the far right corner of a distressed yellow building, I don’t remember sighting trails of lights dancing across the night sky. Not even the big illuminated stars floating in the December wind. Alone in the solemn company of quiet and the written words, I spent Christmas away from home, from family, last year.

It was a lonely Christmas. Not lonely in the sickest, or the gravest of the term, but I was lonely in a way that one felt lonely being away or being excluded from a celebration of good cheer — other than that my heart was full, and I was grateful for new friends, their unconditional magnanimity, for food, for music, for the words. And for myself. It was a quiet I fought hard for, a quiet I desperately wanted for myself. So the loneliness didn’t sting so much.

On the afternoon after Christmas when I came and made myself comfortable in the arms of nature, the sun was behind me staring down directly at me, and so I shone my bare shoulders to it, and it warmly kissed it. Then the Sun was flushed herself, because I stared back at it, and it quickly hid behind a lean tree. Oh, to be among the silence, to exist to the beat of nature’s heart, to the ringing of the far away flies, to the rushing sound of the pylon wires above the head, and to the crackles of dry leaves under the weight of my feet ... and to rock along the gentle breeze that blows, no human companion could amount to it.

If I were to be all and everything that I was reading as the year neared its end, I was more than anything a lover in grief of losing her beloved to death. I was a lover whose love is deeper than her grief. I was a lover who was holding on through the words. I was a lover who was sick with grief. I was a lover whose eyes stings so much from crying. I was a lover who is so lonely, the kind of lonely that nobody can fill and assume ... but the beloved.

I am in a dream .. I mostly always am in one such dream, and I only pull the curtains off from time to time, but I am never really out of this dream, not ever, and I wouldn’t like to.

But the reality wasn’t so much so the one that I assumed as a reader. But I was lonely too. Lonely in a way that nobody or nothing could fill too, but if I had to choose one from the other, I wouldn’t choose the loneliness of grieving the loss of my beloved. Ever. It is better to be lonely in not having my beloved than of losing them to death, to nothing, to the dark, to never, to never again. My poor, poor, heart cannot bear that, will never be able to bear it. It is better to be said ‘something’ back to than the realisation that not one - not one! - of your texts — of love or of pain, will ever be received, opened, or read, or replied to by your beloved because they have physically and permanently left this world. Oh! the absolute and the profound pain of losing one’s beloved, that must cut the deepest of all. On what grounds, or account, does one choose loving? On the tender fact that one day you would lose your beloved to death, after which there will be no more next, no more again’s.

As I went into the new year tucked into an early sleep, belly and heart full with the endless kindness of stranger-turned-friends, I made a mental recollection of the people across oceans & mountains who weren’t celebrating, and were grieving, and that realisation of being bound by no cheer, was my silent celebration.

This year, grief filled up most of my existence. It was my first time coming closest to it. Grief, I learn, is unlike anything I have ever felt before. It is truly strange and gets stranger with time. Grief, as I understand, is something each one of us singularly create a language for to speak it in, when we experience it. Anything you know about it, have heard about it, or read about it prior to that is merely a false signal telling you you have grasped it. But when grief actually comes, everything you thought you knew crumbles in an instant, and there you are, stranded, in a strange reservoir of unknown. If you wish to make it out, you have to stay and draw a map on your own in the darkness.

Thereafter, once grief has entered you, you are undeniably gripped by it. And everything you view as meaning in your life; people, family, you see them invariably through the lens of grief (of their inevitable death). This tendency is unshakable. It is tormenting, hideous, and suffocating but is always present. It means that anything slightly bad happening leads to a standstill before the thought of the finality of death.

In times of unwarranted exposure to this ill-feeling, upon which my entire capacity to exist become abnormally jammed, there remains a part of me that almost always reach out to the thoughts of a particular someone; Joan Didion. I try to imagine how she did it, does it, night after night. And I hold on to her strength for anchor. My thoughts have always circled back to her, and few nights before Christmas this year, swirling in the whirlpool of another paralysis of senses, I called to mind Didion and went on to keep her there.

On the night of 23rd, at bedtime, I saw the news flashing on my phone screen — Joan Didion has passed away. What does the news of death of someone you have been thinking recurrently about mean! It was heartbreaking at the time, I wasn’t moved by the death of any writer as much before. Didion was special to me also because I remembered her always as someone being the age companion of my grandfather.

Death had stopped meaning just death, to me. One day maybe I will be equipped to write about it without feeling overwhelmed by it, for now, I won’t speak about it yet.

This year, collectively as a family, we silently expressed ban on Christmas cheer and any kind of celebration. It felt the necessary and the right thing to do. Personally, too. For so many (of us) all cheer and celebration have been mercilessly robbed, killed, and butchered. A lot (of us) are grieving and carrying into the new year old & new wounds. Some that might fill with time, and many that will never heal.

Every night, just as I got into bed and gathered into a unit the thoughts of people far away, near, and ones at home, who carried the unbearable burden of grief in their hearts, I felt a genuine gratitude for rest and nighttime. I strongly believed in my heart in that moment, that maybe whatever they felt and carried throughout the day, when night came, no matter for what stretches of time, but they could at last have rest. For the entirety of the moment that they could have it when sleep arrived. It meant something, it means something.

Oh, and there is music! Music, music, music! And poetry. How much life is made better, brighter, easier, by and with music in it. Oh, and to be consumed by the enthralling hold of music, to be turned inside it in a never-breaking loop, to taste it over and over again, as if it’s the first time you are tasting it. I could swim in the waves of music for eternity and never tire of it, never complain of it, never stop desiring it. In company of music, there are endless dreams, endless fulfillments, endless creations, endless cultivation, and endless words, words, words ...