Good Mourning...Goodbye

A year after he fled the world, Michael Jackson was more alive than ever in all the news channels today. Sad to see that even after his death, controversy is still his companion. A piece about how his dad Joe Jackson flourished in the days after his famous meal-ticket son’s death and seemed not to be in mourning made me think - Is there a stringent way to mourn? Is there a “Mourning for Dummies” which tells you how to react to a passing?

My maternal grandfather passed away the year I finished school. The Gulf war, a few years back, had given him a weak heart and age wasn’t on his side either. When we came to know that he was very sick, my mum and dad rushed about trying to get to India as fast as possible. I was more upset at leaving Riyadh for good than anything else…I don’t know if it was selfish of me, but I guess the enormity of the situation didn’t sink in…till I walked into the hospital room. There on the bed lay a shadow of the man I called Achicha (grandfather)…the person whom I had always only seen in starched kurtas and perfectly ironed mundu (dhoti) lay covered to his waist in a ghastly hospital sheet. This person had been my friend during my vacations…my walking buddy come rain or shine…the person whom I loved to fight with…the neat freak who lovingly let me eat from his plate even though it was something he hated…the supposedly “angry man” who put up with all my idiosyncrasies…just lay there in bed watching as my mum sat beside him and wept.

My grand-dad passed away a few days afterwards. When they brought his body home in the dead of the night, there was no electricity due to heavy rains. The moment his body entered the threshold of the house he had so lovingly built, all the lights came on in a flash, then there was flash of lightning and deafening thunder and then blinding darkness again. To me it felt like the Nature was giving him an honorary 21 gun salute. I dutifully sat beside his body and watched as people who knew him from different walks of life came to pay their last respects – yet I sat there unmoved. My attention remained fixed on his face. There was a calm beautiful smile on his face – it seemed he was laughing at some private joke and I remember wondering what it could be. Everyone seemed to want to comfort me, but I felt nothing…I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t feel any sadness either. I am not sure if anyone thought it was odd that I looked so indifferent, so uncaring, and totally devoid of any emotion…but I didn’t shed a tear. Just didn’t feel like it. He was laid to rest in the compound of the ancestral house facing his room. Whenever I saw mum and granny crying I wondered why I didn’t feel this grief and wondered if I was such a heartless creature. I would dream about him every night, about all the little things we did together and always got up happy and again that emotion confused me. I don’t think I want to justify this behavior by thinking that I was detached or in shock or something. I felt fully in control and I wasn’t fighting back tears and trying to be brave either. A week later a few of us we were sitting in my grandfather’s room talking. My mum’s cousin lay on her lap and reminiscing about my mum’s marriage and how much he wanted to go see her get married, but everyone was against it as he was very naughty and how my grandfather had ignored everyone and taken him along and given him sweets and stuff … somewhere along the way both of them began to cry and that was it. I felt like a hand was squeezing my throat, choking me. I got up and ran as fast as I could and ended up in a little corridor of the house before the tears overtook me. I cried and cried like I had never cried before….cried for everything my granddad was to me, how I would never get to tell him how much he meant to me, how much he would be missed, how I would have loved to hold his hand and gone on one last walk with him…how I would have liked to have one last fight with him…how I would never see him smile his dazzling smile at me again. It took me a few years to realize that I probably didn’t express my grief the conventional way because I probably didn’t even feel he was gone – I was living with him in my dreams and the sense of loss took longer to sink in.

From that day on every time I hear people gossip about so and so who didn’t cry at a loved one’s passing, I wonder – Who are they to judge someone’s grief? Should we mourn to please society or because the nature of the loss is so strong that you feel the need to express that pain - IN YOUR OWN WAY?

Note: Sorry this is such a long post…got a bit carried away and no amount of editing had the power to shrink it. And sorry about the un-original title...

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” – Anon