When they died: meditations on grief

#2: I think my 2021 therapist would be proud

I feel it’s important to preface this piece by emphasising that I started writing it earlier this year after a death anniversary, about my own bereavement journey over the years. By no means am I trying to minimise the gravity of death or the impact on those left behind, and my changing relationship with the concept of grief should be apparent by the end.

An E5 October sunset

May 2016

When my paternal grandad died, my first experience of familial bereavement, I curled up in bed and watched the next episode of Peaky Blinders once the text came through – I was catching up at the time. His life support had been switched off after four days in a coma, and my whole family was at the hospital, but I couldn’t bring myself to go. Regretful? Perhaps. He always praised my affinity for languages, though he favoured the Latin that was forced on me over the Spanish I enjoyed. Our last conversation was about a book gifted to him by two Spanish numismatic consultants (his profession); a compilation of their research.

Two days after he died, I sat my first AS exam, Economics I believe. Life goes on, right? Not to blow my own trumpet but I aced those exams, despite my school offering zero support or consideration towards my circumstances, though my grades would suffer the following academic year.

April 2017

When my youngest maternal aunt died, aged 30, I had planned to spend the evening at home. If I had, my last memory of her alive would be her at home, happy, or as much as one can be after having a wisdom tooth removed. If I had, my last memory of her alive wouldn’t be unconscious in the middle of my grandparents’ living room, while a lone paramedic who arrived on a bike tried to bring her back. I wouldn’t have stood on that doorstep with hope, thinking there was no way that fate was so twisted that I could lose two of the closest people in my life in the space of eleven months. I wouldn’t have waited anxiously for an ambulance to arrive 45 minutes after it had been called and watched my mum’s face crumple when they wouldn’t let her go with her baby sister to the hospital.

When she died, I chain-smoked the entire walk to the hospital, to no avail, only my own respiratory detriment. I paused in the middle of the street when the text came through that ‘She’s gone,’ the same text I’d received less than a year earlier, gendered differently.

Southampton Row has never looked the same.

After she died, I found peace by placing blame – I had to rationalise it somehow, healthy 30-year-olds don’t just die. I won’t divulge the specifics of said blame, except maybe the inefficiency of the NHS, who were too late to respond, because what can a paramedic on a bike do? Austerity really does kill.

January 2021

When my maternal grandad died, I was in my final year of university. My paternal grandad passed away in my brother’s final year, some perverse serendipity. When he died, I was in the shower, the fact of his imminent death as certain as the water cascading down me being wet. My brother and I had gone in vain to the hospital earlier, partially with the hope we’d be able to see him, but mostly for the physical proximity, for me at least. Instead, we stood outside for an hour while my mum and her siblings filtered in, two at a time, to say their goodbyes. It was just the time of his death that was uncertain and I didn’t want to be notified immediately when it happened. Covid, it was, while Downing Street threw their cheese and wine parties. ‘Let the bodies pile high’ – what good has ever come from an Etonian in a position of power?

When he died, it had been weeks since I’d seen him, longer still since I’d hugged him (that was December 26th 2020, he passed away exactly a month later, six days after my 22nd birthday). When he died, it wasn’t until his funeral a few days later that I was allowed to see him: for the first time in a month, and the last time earthside. I take comfort in knowing that my last words to him were telling him that I loved him, at the end of a phone call I’d felt compelled to make before we knew he was ill.

When he died, I knew that life couldn’t possibly get any worse, no matter the circumstances, because I’d lost my favourite person in the world. My parents and brother aside, I don’t think there’s anyone whose passing could affect me so profoundly.

Toddler Nas and her maternal grandparents on one of their birthdays, c2003

I came across a passage last night in Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water on the bond between grandfather and granddaughter:

Her jiddo was the person in her life to make monsters disappear from under the bed and banish them from closets. He made everything softer and brighter. And now, when the world was growing darker and a scary thing lurked all around and inside her, Nur pleaded with Nzinga, "Can I please go see my jiddo?”

Yes, I did spend the next half hour crying, the relationship between Nur and Mamdouh a mirror image of mine and my nana’s (‘maternal grandad’ in most South Asian dialects).

***

Now they’re all dead, death means little to me. Of course, I often ponder my own mortality as is human nature, but I’m desensitised to death around me. The profundity of loss no longer registers with me. Rather, grief is just another fleeting emotion, not the perpetual state in which I used to live.

For a long time after experiencing those losses, I was desensitised to death. Fucked up, right? Perhaps desensitised is too severe a word, numb might be more appropriate. It worked out well for a while – I had friends who went through their own losses, and I was an empathetic shoulder to cry on without getting overly emotional. The same friends on whom I felt like a burden when I was going through my own grief, knowing none of them understood at the time. There’s only so much a person who’s never experienced grief can take from a grieving person.

Recently, though, my grief has caught up with me. Of course, time makes the emotions more bearable, but I became accustomed to repressing them entirely. It’s easier to joke about death than face your feelings about it. Needless to say, there were the inescapable waves of grief, but they tended to be sporadic crying episodes that lasted about 20-30 minutes that I’d look back on and laugh at myself for. ‘Get a grip love,’ my inner critic would taunt. The joys of existing in a society that portrays grief as ‘a wild, unacceptable emotion that must be handled, managed, overwritten and hidden. We are pressured by political and even physical force to prioritize productivity over personal well-being, to seek eternity over embodied presence, even as we live through the most traumatic losses.’ ¹ Given that all three losses were at pivotal academic points in my life (AS, A Level, final year of undergrad), there was no choice but to grin and bear it.

***

So, what’s changed? A death toll that’s surpassed 15,000, according to local authorities, approximately 6,150 children and 4,000 women making up that figure.

Digression, but a necessary one: Of course, the men matter too, and any narrative that suggests otherwise is either racist, Islamophobic or both. As a Muslim woman – granted, with my fair share of religious trauma – I look at my dad, my brother, my uncles, and my cousins, and I see men on whom I know I can depend unconditionally. I see men who would go to the ends of the earth for me, not the barbarians that they’ve been categorised as over the years. I think about my two grandads and they were full of nothing but love, at least through my lens.

It's common for collective grief to ‘trigger feelings about our own losses and experiences of grief and exacerbate existing psychological distress’² though it wasn’t something I was quite prepared for. It's been almost eight weeks of crying near enough daily – at first, I acknowledged this as a natural response to the horrors we’ve been witnessing (and once again, I have to call out the lack of humanity in individuals who remain unmoved and unfazed at this point). However, in the videos and images of the children who have lost everything, I see my two little cousins who lost their mum when they were aged 5 and 3. In the mass graves, I see my maternal grandad who was just another statistic in the media, one out of 232,112³. My personal losses are reflected back at me, and I’m forced to confront them. Then, there are the unfathomable tragedies: The mother holding her child’s shrouded body for the last time, the scattered body parts collected in bags, the roads lined with corpses, the unidentifiable martyrs, Reem’s grandad with her earring pinned to him – these are to name a few.

As the title suggests, I didn’t start writing this piece to make a point – these are just some reflections. All the cliches about grieving are true: It doesn’t look the same for any two people, there’s no right or wrong way to go about it, it’s something that you learn to live with rather than something that you overcome, et cetera. A final thought, given the resurfacing of my personal feelings in light of devastation in a supposedly faraway land, is Rafeef Ziadah’s poem echoing in my mind: We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir. Truer words have never been spoken.

1. Malkia Devich-Cyril, 2021

2. British Psychological Society, 2022

3. World Health Organisation, 2023