The permanence of our loss
Much like how vaccines work, loss too operates, though just a bit differently. Once you have taken a vaccine, the next time your body senses the disease, it knows the drill. Just a bit similarly yet differently, once you have gone through loss, the next time you witness loss, your body recognises it, even though it does not ever learn to deal with it. Loss bruises you again, and you learn to sense loss, every time. The stalwart Dr Bibek Debroy died last week, and he had penned his obituary four days before he passed away, which was published in a national daily. The news of his passing made me feel a profound sense of what Dr Debroy terms ‘social loss’, but it was definitely reading his self-obituary that catapulted me into feeling loss at its very atomic form. While I did not know Dr Debroy personally, I do know loss personally, for it is a shared feeling, though it looks different to and for each of us — much like living, we all know what it is to live, though in our own ways.
While reading Dr Debroy’s note, I was spurred into exploring my detachment with life, for two of Dr Debroy’s thoughts echoed consistently — whether on his possible passing away permanent loss will accrue (except one personal loss), and his concluding sentence on whether the mind will or can heal from the experience undergone.
On loss, Dr Debroy wrote, ‘not much social loss’, ‘possible private loss’, finally concluding with ‘no permanent loss’. And so I wonder, what is loss, beyond the dictionary? Is loss just the future loss of the social value we create, the networks we might have enriched in the future? Is loss quantified as the missing ideas that someone would have ideated had life not been cut short? Is loss seen as the empty seat at the dining table that speaks of the love that once flowed? Is the absence of grieving an indicator of the impermanence of loss? I borrow ink from CS Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle who called the death of a beloved ‘an amputation’. You indeed feel like you have lost a limb when you lose someone you love. The pain, searing at first, persistent yet fading as time passes, and as the months go by, the dull ache of loss, the bottomless pit in your being that talks of your loss, all the time. The loss is permanent but you learn to live with the loss. Does it mean the loss is lost? Maybe not. We are so adept at adapting, we learn. Yet, the loss is potently permanent. You cannot tell someone to stop missing their arm, or their leg, you cannot tell someone to stop missing someone they loved. Like the vaccine response, my muscle memory invokes my sense of personal loss on losing my father. As we step out of the festive season, for one going through the loss of a loved one, this time of the year is that intrusive thought that keeps scraping off the scab every time, and any hopes of living with a healed scar are lost. And so was it for us as a family, this year.
Navigating a melange of emotions, my mind was occupied with what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her deeply felt memoir ‘Notes on Grief’, wrote, “I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense”. This sentence remained with me ever since, for this parting sentence of the book carves an abyss so deep where even silence does not reach. I realised I will choke if I told myself the meaning of Chimamanda’s sentence, and so I just read it like it is, literally. Is this loss not permanent? I have learnt to live with the loss of my father whom I loved dearly, but is routine akin to forgetting? I affirm, no. If Chimamanda could not bear the thought of writing about her father in the past tense, was loss really impermanent?
Dr Debroy concluded his note wondering whether the mind will or can heal from the experience undergone. This nudged me to think whether the very act of writing our own obituary can be termed as an inflexion point in the trajectory of our lives, for a self-obituary is not just a reflection on how we lived life, but a blueprint of how we intend to live life. Dr Debroy spoke with detachment of the vast body of work he leaves behind, but the intangible aspects of loss and detachment are what he leaves for us to think. What if we write our own obituaries at some point in our lives, will we be able to add meaning to the years lived, and the moments to be lived?
Dr Debroy, in writing your obituary, you have etched the permanence of our loss, you have imparted language to what can only be felt. In feeling the sense of loss at losing you, not public or social or private, loss, in its very atomic form, I did not need to know you, I just needed to know losing, or loving. That I look up to you has made the gash of this loss deeper.
— The writer is an officer of the Indian Revenue Service
