Last year has been heavy for a lot of us. And yes 2021 is better we hope and I hope but, I’ve been thinking of our ability to move on. I’ve been thinking of our ability to process tragedy. I’ve also been thinking of our ability to completely ignore or numb ourselves to it.
When I was getting married, over 15 years ago – an extremely emotional time for my family because my sister was terminally ill, but we had to get on with it – who can say who had it the worst? But I think I can. My sister of course because she was the one facing it, the illness and the depravity it brings with it. The inability to hop, skip and jump and be carefree, the constant reminder her body imposed on her so she could not for a second forget the incredibly grave situation at her doorstep. The uncertainty and helplessness of this young girl forced to face her death while the world moves on, her friends graduate, live their lives and her sister gets married, while the festivities of a new life in bloom are in full swing.
The house was abuzz as houses are when there is a wedding in Southern India. In large families such as ours with great uncles and great aunts, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, childhood family friends galore and every seemingly inconsequential acquaintance who inevitably is woven into the story of your life. And as is the belief and the reality of being Indian it is somehow consequential and hence essential. There is divinity and drama, hustle and hoopla. Marigold and jasmine and green leaves woven around doorsteps pressed with turmeric and vermillion red to mark the auspicious proceedings. There are hordes of chairs stacked and tents/the shamiana in front of the house. There are little kids milling about and several things happening in tandem. Different rooms occupied by different groups each immersed in their own discussion, some planning the next meal, what they need to wear, gossip or old news, some catching up but everything is in motion at all times. An itinerary that spills over several days like a bell curve with ceremonies for the bride and groom separately leading up to the mehendi/sangeet a borrowed North Indian but now mainstay tradition because we are city dwellers and hence, we adapt to everything that gives us an excuse to gather and throw a party. And the tallest tip of this curve being the wedding day which then slopes down softly to a Reception and then some puja/prayer ceremonies and finally maybe a trip to the holy city of Tirupati followed by lunches and dinners for the newly-weds to get to know all the surfaces and sides of the multi-dimensional families they hail from.
And all of this was happening while she was in pain, couldn’t move by herself and was bedridden. It was cruel. How could we even think of a celebration is something I couldn’t quite get my head around, not then, not now. If weddings are a blur by itself our situation lent it a surrealism of a different kind. My parents were in some kind of hell I’m sure. Weddings in India for a girl’s parents are a caricature not without its realities. I wasn’t getting married into that kind of a family, however. My in-laws were and still are decent and dignified people. They didn’t make any cinematic demands. No one need to have forced my parents to throw a wedding. No, it wasn’t a choice. It just wasn’t even questioned. My sister was excited and wanted to see me get married. I said yes and this was the natural next step. My parents were already dealing with a situation so dire, getting me married would make it one less thing to worry about for them. This was something good we could hold on to after nearly 7 years since our world fell apart, since she was diagnosed. How modern and antiquated. How progressive and muddled. A few weeks before the frenzy of the preparations started, she was losing her eyesight. She made no big show of it. We only knew because she asked for us to pass things to her. And my parents. They had to put on this wedding and juggle feeling happy for one daughter who was getting married and starting a new life with a wonderful man, while they tended to their younger daughter, the apple of everyone’s eye under the same roof as she lay there dying. Between finalizing the décor and flowers for the mandap (wedding dais) and visits to the hospitals and calls with the doctors, last minute trips my dad took to far-off corners of India where someone promised a miracle for my sister, getting the wedding cards printed and shopping for clothes, and having painful procedures to drain the excess fluid in her liver we were a family cracked like a mirror still holding it all together, every broken piece with our bleeding hands.
We cried and we laughed. I think our laughter was superficial and hollow but maybe it wasn’t. I cannot remember. It feels like a nightmare I sleepwalked through. That year saw several natural disasters in the world with hurricanes, earthquakes and at that time in particular I remember a Tsunami in Thailand. I was distressed and unsettled and felt guilty about my wedding. I remember vaguely a conversation I had with my mom about how we could celebrate anything when there was so much pain in the world. I think my sister was stable at the time, there was some hope, there always was, up and down, up and down we went, a miracle somewhere, news about a doctor, or results, or something else that felt promising and we held on to it. So perhaps it wasn’t ironic that I was agonizing over the tsunami when I didn’t have to look far for a reason, when it was absurd that we even thought of my wedding with my sister’s health at the time. I remember my mother told me that life doesn’t stop, that we owe it to life to keep living, to try our best, to help but to push forward. I couldn’t understand or fathom it. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I tried to be convinced but I wasn’t. I was going through the motions and I suspect she was as well. I suspect we all were. Eventually I got married and my sister was there as much as she could be. And a month after I got married, she was in the ICU in a coma. A month later I was in India and we airlifted her to Bangalore with my parents. Six months after I got married, three months after days and nights in the hospital outside her ICU I came back to the US after my parents convinced me to go back and to return again soon and two days after she passed away.
I read Sue Monk Kidd’s book ‘The Secret Life of Bees’ many years after and can recollect the story but not in great detail. What is still vividly ensconced in my memory though was this character, a girl who felt everything deeply. There was a wall of wailing where she marked every sad thing she heard or witnessed and wept for them. I think maybe she even lighted candles. She couldn’t help herself, she had no defense, no balm, no ability to numb the pain or hide. She eventually drowns herself and dies because she cannot take the pain any longer. It was heartbreaking to read. I felt deeply for this character as she stood out and stayed with me more than anything else in that story.
And so the recent events in my city, the murder suicide of a doctor who killed himself but not before holding a few hostage and eventually killing the doctor, a mom of three, a vibrant joyous looking woman who looked like her whole life was ahead of her – her senseless murder and the tragedy got me thinking. As my community grappled with this horror, as I imagined and failed to understand how her husband and loved ones, how her children could absorb any of this. I thought of the father during the Boston Marathon, his child had died in the explosion, and he went back home in his shorts and athletic gear matted with dust and blood, a neighbor observed, without his child. Of the Sandy Hook children whose lives were cut short and so many stories every day and every minute and second – of the pain and the loss and the helplessness. I thought of the accidents in India, the ones I witnessed or heard of and that never left me. And I thought of the wailing wall. That we’re teetering between one extreme and the other – of complete apathy or complete surrender, staring into red gushing gaping open wounds, on the edges of one or the other and afraid to go too far either way.
I still don’t understand how we process tragedy or even if we do. I know it’s taken me well over a decade to survive the tragedy my sister went through. I still don’t comprehend it completely, but I know I was able to find or settle into a state that helped me function as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend and member of the society. I know if I didn’t settle into that state, I would probably have been in some institution caught in some infinite maze or I would probably not be around anymore. All I do know is we move on and it is as ugly as it sounds. We just move on. But though we may physically have moved on we carry it with us and we let it in, little by little and the dosage and how it is administered perhaps either harms or heals us.
