Grieving 101(ish)

It's been a year. As cathartic as mourning feels, there probably isn't a solid 'moment' of closure. It's just an interplay of shitty and non-shitty days.

Unfortunately, grief isn't linear, like the Housefull films. It's fluid, like the Rohit Shetty Cop Multiverse. It's messy, flowing into other parts of your life, amplifying your negative thoughts and making you see the pointlessness of everything.

Sometimes it's subtle. Like the empty chair at the table. It doesn’t demand attention, but is impossible to ignore. To the point where one can’t imagine making a meal for 3 people, because it’s always been 4, right? Food gets left over every day. But cooking less doesn’t seem like an option.

Other times, grief feels like side-character energy. It has tremendous potential to be its own thing in its own story, but gets pushed to a corner because there isn’t the time or nuance to explore it fully. Occasionally, it will be used in an Instagram post for likes and self-pity, but doesn’t amount to any real healing.

Is ‘healing’ even a real thing? The official mantra of struggling in your 20s, that kinder people refer to as ‘work-in-progress’ and the voice in your head calls ‘I’m-never-going-to-be-enough-so-I-should-stop-feeling-sorry-for-myself’ is such a clusterfuck of emotions. Time passes and you feel like you've made real progress, but suddenly see a memory pop up in Google Photos or smell a fart identical to theirs. And before you know it, you’re breaking down in a friend’s garage and questioning if you ever made or ever will make any progress at all.

Shame they don't let you store pungent farts in jars.

‘Why am I feeling sorry for myself?’ Is another question you ask, because off late, the ‘I’ve lost someone’ Fan Club has become bigger than members of SPAT (Seekers of Platonic Association on Tinder) and SIMP (Shows Invent My Personality). While the orgy of collective grief reassures you that you aren't alone, it also pushes you to not dwell on your thoughts, because someone always has it worse. If they aren't breaking down, what right do you have?

Feeling sorry for yourself is inevitable, because you never feel like you had enough time with someone. Unless your friend is sending you memes from the pot, while you desperately need to poop too. In that case, any time is too much.

Life's a commode, and grief is shit. It has to come out.

‘It's been a while. Am I weak if I still feel sad?’ is something you ask yourself because the world is full of dicks who believe that being perpetually hard is the only way to exist, and being flaccid makes you less of a dick. Never forget that hard dicks are the reason behind harassment, drunk texts, overconfident photography, and not getting to your tasks immediately after waking up. If someone is perpetually hard, they’re probably using Viagra and the pressure will eventually catch up. One day, they will get an unrelenting boner in the zoo while looking at a monkey and realise what it feels like to feel helpless.

Fuck potency, emotional availability is real growth.

'Making jokes is disrespectful.' Funny how the dead rarely object, but people around them do. Moral policers will counsel the right way to grieve, while doing precious little grieving themselves. You can’t smile too much, cry too much, laugh too much, or be anything much. You need to keep an expression that says, ‘I’m a reasonable percentage of sad, but so strong in powering through that you will feel sorry for me while admiring my grit.’

Or Arjun Kapoor in an emotional scene.

Finding humour in loss is a glorious internal cleanse, much like when your friend finally shuts Instagram and opens the door to your weeping bowels. It makes the loss feel within your control. Because humour is the most human way to humanise things. What a stupid sentence. Or maybe that’s the full form of Triple H.