THE CARMEL BEAT
A Story Unfinished
Nallur Manasa Ramesh, Litsoc
When you lose someone you love, you lose everything that makes you who you are. Grief is complicated, it's unsettling and debilitating but maybe in all the grieving, processing, and healing, you reassemble all the broken pieces to become a little less broken.
I’m lying on my side on the couch, with the phone in my hand, scrolling aimlessly wherever my fingers touch. I feel the couch take up my heat, it melts into its very bones, I feel the pieces of wood pressing against my shoulder, hurting every inch of me, but I’m too tired to shift my position. This seems to be the only thing I know how to do; let my body reign over every thought and movement of mine, let it consume the world I knew before this- I don’t even remember it. I can hear my mother’s breath across me, the only thing I make sure of, I find myself constantly checking if she is breathing, the gentle and subtle up and down wave of her chest was the only thing that kept me going. No light enters the house, even if it does, I despise it, I cannot stand the slightest glimmer of sunlight. I feel myself falling slowly but steadily into a chasm which now seems way too familiar.
“He will get better, right?” I was sick of listening to this question that my mother kept repeating like a stuck record, I would joke and say, “No, he won’t. OF COURSE, HE WILL!”
Life had strung itself in a strange succession of events, taking him to the hospital, when he was the healthiest person I had ever seen, pushing me to my very limits, making everyday a challenge, placing my feet on the ground being the most difficult task of all. Even in the darkest moments, whether we realize it or not, there is always a shred of hope, which is the only reason we keep trying, and I did too. The hope that we would all get better and live in a home and not a house, that we would all be together in the same room like before. My mind seemed to be erasing all events prior to this, like a used duster on a blackboard, leaving remnants of a time I could barely recognize and piece together.
Every time the phone rang, it was accompanied with a sigh and an unreasonable amount of frustration. You still have to pick it, so my mother and I did, but what came after flipped our worlds upside down. I was stripped of everything I knew about myself and the things around me. I couldn’t feel the ground under my feet. It was like a fire burning my very being.
I saw my father burn to ashes and my life and soul with it. I felt nothing, his death brought out the nothingness in me-the emptiness, the chasm, and words made their way out of my mouth so mechanically
fall into someone’s arms crying, screaming in fury at the way life had unfolded. I wanted those things, but I never let them reveal themselves. I let my body lead me places I had to go, I let words lead me to the things I had to get done, because death is not just the loss of a person but also his clothes, his books, his bags, his razor, his watch, the clinking of his car keys, his loud voice across the room and everything that made him who he was.
Grief is complicated, and it cannot be put into a box. Grief shapeshifts in the form of tears, angry words, numbness, denial, acceptance, acknowledgement and tiny bursts of happiness at the most unexpected moments. It is a journey of finding a world in which the person you love, the relationship you had or didn’t have, leaves unfinished, it is finding pieces of you underneath all the rubble of the place you knew, finding meaning and a middle -ground for your existence. The funny thing is, death brought back life in me, a life I did not know existed. It made me face all of my internal disputes and insecurities, it gave me a sense of what I wanted and who I wanted to be. It comes in fragments, a lot of the time almost in a fog, but it’s there. I still feel the rawest emotions like sadness and a sense of loss, but I also am starting to find a soft bob and weave of my emotions. It’s going back and forth constantly of cherishing the memories you had and grieving the memories that you have been robbed of. But as Professor Morrie Schwartz said ‘Death ends a life, not a relationship.’
I almost never knew what I was saying. There wasn’t a single tear, not the slightest sadness, grief, anger or frustration, just a blank paper.
Desire was a ghost to me, paralysis became the only thing I knew- paralysing nothingness, paralysing grief, paralysing showers of condolences that I replied to out of courtesy, paralysing hurt and pain, like nothing I had ever known before. I convinced myself he would walk in, opening the door with a suitcase in hand, with a smile on his face, but I didn’t see him, my mind couldn’t imagine what he looked like. It brought back his face, calm, serene, sleeping, carefree dad, the one I saw sometimes at home, and the last one in the hospital bed.
Death has a strange way of creeping into your life, I would like to think of it as two arms hanging from above waiting to grab the next soul, leaving the body a desert, a mere vessel of desolation. Death also seems to be a huge fan of surprises, it loves to make its presence felt when you didn’t even realize it was looming in the corner, waiting to grab you when your time came.
I would never get out of the chasm,
I would never feel better,
I would curl myself into a ball, and let the sorrow and agony consume me.
I did not cry, I did not scream, I did not talk, I did not exist. I was gone. Hope still lingers in the dead chambers of my heart, slowly decaying, waiting to be sucked out of me. I wanted to be held, I wanted to
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