Grief is like an uncut diamond. Each side when polished reveals the beauty inside. Each facet, once sharpened, displays the shimmering strength of what eventually emerges as the honed stone – atoms pushed together through the build up of time, hard, packed with their own power.

I’ve lost many loved ones – each either to an eventual physical death, or then an absence of their spirit near me. Love lost is love lost, whether its effects are in the here and now or in the ether across oceans or lifetimes.

Of the hardest losses to endure was my grandfather, gone forever from the physical realm, and my son, present, but far, absent, but just a phone call away. Other losses were of romantic love, mostly me being hurt by all the (mis)deeds my own heart undertook which overwhelmed it into being unable to handle intimate life. Loving another human being is difficult enough, but to stop loving someone is even more so.

My grandfather was the first and most trusted authority of my childhood. He taught me how to pray in Avestan, each night we had the same conversation about the nonexistence of monsters under the bed, his words floating around me like a quiet hum. He gave me a first print volume of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, he made me want to be a journalist because he believed I’d surpass him in my deep curiosity for the dynamics of human behaviour. He saved each article published with my byline, he heard each rant I had – a mash of righteous demands and youthful angst on politics, gender disparity, philosophy, religion, art. His stoic presence often a panacea to the rage inside me at how the world was just not enough, how my indignant soul wanted to change everything (and then some).

When he died, gentle and quiet (and typical) in his sleep, not imposing himself on anyone, I was miles away, my expat heart beating to a normal rhythm, taking care of a family to which I held the sealant role of mother and wife, in remote Reykjavik. It was late at night when my father called, my mother unable to speak of her father’s passing on. For several moments I could not understand what he was saying. But, how could it be – I just cooked a nice meal of daal-chawaal, I just put the four year old to sleep, I just finished hanging up the laundry, I just came up to answer a trilling phone because the only time it rang this late was with news from back home. Mumbai – the home of my parents, and a now dead grandparent, the most important person in my life.

The sound that came out of me that night was so painful it woke up our son. My husband at the time returned him to bed, convinced him he was having a bad dream, it really wasn’t his mother with the dazed dumb eyes but the demon of sorrow which had camped inside her. I curled up in a corner and went foetal, back to where I needed to be – a child whose love was snatched away, far too early, the loss of something cherished but taken for granted. I don’t remember much after that but somewhere I know I was lifted and removed from that corner, I was told I couldn’t fly back, I’d never make it in time for the funeral, I couldn’t see him one last time, even in death. I took a day off from my new job, grieved as much as one day can allow for the death of a lifetime of love. The following afternoon when they called me from the funeral hall in India, I slid into the glass fronted conference room of my work place in Iceland, my back turned, shuddering to the intensity of this loss, unable to be present to experience it in person, listening to the chanting of priests who did not know one beloved grandchild in another continent was currently being crushed under the weight of grief.

If he was alive he’d be 99 this year. If he was alive he’d look at me and say, ‘whatever you’ve done with your life, you’ve made me proud’, he’d wipe my tears and make me believe it isn’t too late to seek redemption from the guilt of not having said goodbye properly, at not having spent more words together, shown more kindness to his own kindness. Is it too late after a person dies to show them kindness? Is it too late to love them even more than you have while they lived? Is the pain of complete loss exacerbated by their spirit – a ghost of everything they mean to you, but difficult to act upon? I wish we had more time, I wish we had done more when we did meet, I wish I’d told him so many things I never did for fear of hurting myself, or him or the imagined pain I’d cause others around us. I wish. I wish.

I wish that once, just once, he’d whisper in my ear he forgives me for not giving him one last hug, one last parting word, one last smile from a grandaughter to the man she loved the most.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hello! I’m Peri Desai

I’m Peri, welcome to my space. In it you will find stuff that moves me, maddens me, captures my attention, makes me question its truth. You will read what makes me curious, annoyed, energized, joyful, vulnerable.