When Does Grief Really Begin?
Some questions never really leave us. This is one I am still carrying.
I always thought the hardest day would be the day I lost Aai.
I was wrong.
Because losing her wasn't something that happened on one day. In many ways, Alzheimer's had been taking her away for thirteen years, slowly, quietly, one small change at a time.
The last few years were the most difficult... watching her words fade into silence, her world grow smaller, her smile become rarer, holding her hand a little tighter each day, cherishing her last papi, and finally, her last breath.
The hardest part isn't that Aai is gone. It's that I watched her disappear, little by little, over thirteen years.
Maybe that's why grief feels so confusing. I'm holding on to the memories I want, while still carrying the ones I never asked for.
I remember one evening when Baba had gone to Pune for work. By then, Aai could no longer dial a phone on her own and would get anxious very quickly. I was talking to her about something that had upset me. She could see I was emotional, and she wanted to comfort me, but words had already begun to leave her.
After a pause, she looked at me and said, "I can't remember exactly what our relationship is... but tell him. He will definitely help you."
She meant Baba.
She couldn't remember who I was to her in that moment, but she never doubted him.
Maybe that's why I don't know what I'm grieving anymore... losing my mother, or letting go of the thirteen years we lived through together.
People often asked me, "Did your mother still recognize you?"
Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself that question.
Because somewhere along the way, her pain had become a part of me. I had started living for both of us.
Long before she stopped speaking, I had already started having conversations with the version of her that lived in my heart. Somehow, even after she's gone, that conversation hasn't ended.
Maybe time doesn't erase pain. Maybe it simply teaches us to carry it a little differently. Or maybe we just keep hoping that one day it won't feel this heavy.
More than anything, I wish the memories from before those thirteen years came to me more easily. The laughter. The conversations.
Sometimes I think grief is about learning to live with every version of the person you loved, the one you remember, the one you cared for, and the one who quietly continues to live within you.
Perhaps that's why I still don't know the answer to the question that has stayed with me.
Is it painful because she is no more?
Or because I lived her pain for so long?
Maybe some questions aren't meant to be answered.
Maybe they're simply meant to be carried.