The universe that homes us is a wonderful, well-oiled machine, where all effect has cause, all play has pause, and to my greatest dismay, all gain has loss. Loss is inescapable—and like a case of chicken pox, the later in life it comes to you, the worse. Loss can morph into a range of inconveniences—from a mildly vexing missing lip balm, or that dreamy elevator meetcute you forgot to give your number, to life-altering loss of life, love, or home. It can manifest in the mind like a creative block, in the heart like a gaping, aching hole, or in the body like a lost limb. Sometimes, all three at once, so it becomes a part of you—is it not so uniquely human to lug around and feel the thumping weight of something that is, after all, missing?
A part of me is convinced I deal well with loss. I move swiftly to address the damage: throwing around terms like ‘actionable’ and ‘mitigate’, never stopping to have a human response to even the most jolting hits to me or mine. All loss, a part of me believes, can be offset by equivalent gain.
This is how I moved around the world until I lost my best friend, my pet cat. Four days into uprooting my comfortable, fairly happy life and moving to Delhi, my cat, Nobu, found a neat crack in a basement window as I slept, and snuck out to satiate his curiosity. He never returned. Like a fool, I still sit in wait. But like a bigger fool, who knows he’s gone for good, I carry the grief of this excruciating loss like a task I can put off endlessly. Like something I can academise and analyse and mitigate, and investigate. Like something I can write a newsletter edition about.
Now, this is not an account of personal grief, nor a channel for me to expedite processing something that happened 10 long months ago. It is, for the most part, a dilemma. How do you make time to process grief when life requires you to keep going? It takes so much to keep your shit together. To show up at work, show up in friendships, pay bills, order groceries, be active, eat multiple meals a day, take a shower, call mom, make bed. How can I interrupt an already packed schedule with a task as intangible as healing?
Well, there’s no time. Don’t give me shit like “you have to make time”, no, you don’t. It is all too painful to “make time” just to think of the emptiness that follows you more closely than your own shadow in peak Delhi summer. Like the crease that shows up no matter how many times you re-spread your bedsheet. The crease is now a part of it. You can simply accept this as your new reality and pay not a single further thought to it. Right?
Well, here’s how that worked out for me.
I lost my pet, my best friend. I did not cry to friends, I did not cry to family, I did not even cry to myself for fear of how deeply that might ache. This went on *great* for a while, because my sole focus and energy went into actually putting in the work: tirelessly printing posters, distributing thousands of them in the neighbourhood, going on 3 AM walks wearing Nobu’s favourite snack on my sleeve and a shirt drenched in his pee that I hadn’t yet washed (disgusting, but necessary). For months, I forged ahead like a soldier on a mission. The no-time-to-grieve action plan was making me a productive search and rescue operator, and had even won me many cat friends. Overall, smooth sailing.
Then one day, I was standing in a station queue looking at the metro map. I spotted a shade of yellow that reminded me of one of Nobu’s favourite toys… and I felt my fucking eyes well up. For the next ten minutes, I stood there crying, train after train passing me by. I cried writing an email at work, remembering how Nobu would sleep on my laptop and try to paw at my fingers as I typed. I cried because Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift came up on shuffle, and I had once sung it to him when he’d gone missing for a few hours. I cried at every single open window on my way back home. I cried at dinner at Gulati’s for no fucking reason, I cried in the shower without a morsel of context, I cried, I cried, I cried like a broken babydoll, willing my batteries to die. I cried because there was now a tug in my chest that arrived without notice. I never invited it in, so now it barged through the doors. I cried any fucking where and, unless you love strangers’ pity, that’s not... a great way to live. Not so smooth sailing.
So, if I may now share some knowledge, there is a chance the no-time-to-grieve action plan is unsustainable. It’s so fucking tempting but somewhat unsustainable. It’s almost as if when your life starts to move to a constant radio static of emptiness, the answer perhaps is not to drown it out with louder music, but to figure out where the dial is hidden so you can turn it down. This is a delicate exercise. There’s a lot of fucking crying involved. And the bloody headaches after. I started to cry so viscerally that it ended with me throwing up. Sometimes I burst capillaries on my face—if not by the crying, then by the throwing up. It’s ugly, ya’ll. But I suspect we gotta do it.
What is most interesting to me about loss is how much it allows you to learn about yourself. After 10 months of grieving, I can confidently say I have no fucking idea who I am. Here’s an example. I don’t necessarily believe in… well, the ‘spiritual realm’. Voodoo, mediums, chants, spells, though great entertainment on Instagram, freak me out IRL (and that, I believe, is a reasonable response). But check this out. 3 months into Nobu going missing, I heard from a friend about animal communicators who are able to talk to missing pets and lead them back home through the power of cross-species telepathy. I cannot explain to you the speed at which I picked up the phone. I landed on the only communicator who didn’t charge 5 million rupees per session (let’s call her Tooja), and decided to place the entirety of my mental well-being in her hands.
In the first session, I was asked to share a picture of Nobu and describe him using only emotional characteristics, which was a deeply painful but therapeutic exercise in fondly remembering my best friend. Then, days later, she called me claiming she had found my cat.
In this call, which lasted 22 minutes, Tooja became Nobu. She took me through winding roads and gardens through Nobu’s eyes, describing in detail every tree, fence, drain, and blade of grass around him. She painted a picture eerily *too* familiar a sight around where I live. She paused to tell me that Nobu missed me so, asked me to have faith in him that he would return, and made me swear not to hold a grudge against him for leaving. And I, a heartbroken, crestfallen, barely human shell of a catmom, I held on to every single word like it was from Nobu himself.
This is the fucking thing about grief. It’s a brutal cycle of despair, then hope, then despair—like filling up the emptiness within you with something as empty as air. When you’re grasping at straws, keeping up the hope, talking to animal communicators, thinking that the thing you loved is surely not gone, and surely will come back, you’re pumping in that air. My love, you will realise it's just air once that all-destructive storm of hope passes on. And that realisation will shatter you: loudly, uncontrollably, and inconsolably. It’s like the last crack on your tattered phone screen after which your phone finally stops working.
Of course,
That was a good run I had with Tooja, and it makes for a great story to tell. But I’m back to the comfort of agnosticism now. The pain still tugs, but with weakened force. The emptiness has shed some weight, because I refused to feed it hope. All seven (and more) stages of grief have come and gone, though in haphazard order. The crying has reduced considerably since I started indulging it.
What stands strong and undiluted is my love for Nobu: the metro map type nostalgia now only gives way to happy memories. It was good to grieve alone in this loss, in a way, because it has prepared me for more that will inevitably come. If loss is as prevalent as gain in this wretched universe, I might as well familiarise myself with it. Maybe one day I’ll know exactly how to navigate it. What to do to let it affect me the least, how to not let it make me cry looking at open windows.
Maybe one day I’ll win at loss.
About the author: Disha Verma (she/her) is a technology and human rights researcher from New Delhi, India. Her claims to fame include setting quizzes and crosswords, starting art projects but not finishing them, and making a perfect cup of coconut coffee every single morning.
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