Navigating a Life of Loss and Resilience - By Yourisha Pillay

Written By: Yourisha Pillay

Category: Essay

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Yourisha Pillay presents a deeply moving essay, "Navigating a Life of Loss and Resilience," as part of the Essay category in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar. This competition celebrates diverse voices and creative expressions worldwide. Pillay's essay explores profound themes of grief, personal strength, and the continuous journey of healing. Through vivid storytelling and emotional depth, she guides readers through her experiences of enduring multiple losses and the resilience she has built amidst life's challenges.

About the Work

Yourisha Pillay's essay is a heartfelt exploration of how personal tragedy and resilience interweave to shape one's life. Her narrative is rich with imagery and poignancy, capturing the relentless presence of grief and the painstaking process of healing. Pillay's writing style is both reflective and candid, as she navigates themes of loss, identity, and transformation. Through her eloquent prose, she invites readers to witness the complexity of human emotions and the indomitable spirit that emerges from enduring life's most profound challenges.

Navigating a life of loss and resiliance

Original Submission by Yourisha Pillay

Navigating a Life of Loss and Resilience

By Yourisha Pillay

Somewhere, I am convinced, there is an office in the celestial civil service with a file bearing my name. It is very thick. It has coffee stains on it. Several clerks have requested transfers rather than handle it. I have never been allowed to read it, and I have long since stopped asking for an explanation. But I have learned a great deal about what it means to keep living while the paperwork keeps arriving.

Grief does not arrive once, observe the usual social niceties, and leave. It moves in, rearranges the furniture, drinks the last of the milk, and settles into the best chair as though it has signed a permanent lease.

Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it crashes through the house wearing boots. It is always present.

My life has been shaped less by one tragedy than by an accumulation of them: the early death of my father, a childhood shadowed by manipulation, the loss of my mother, infertility, the death of my baby after two months in the NICU, and my brother’s suicide. At times, it has felt as though the universe appointed a particularly overzealous administrator of God to my case, someone determined to stamp APPROVED on every available form of heartbreak.

Through it all, I have had to learn, repeatedly and without the benefit of an instruction manual, how to keep living. This is the story of how loss shaped me, how familiar patterns followed me into adulthood, and how I began building resilience from what remained.

Early Loss: Losing My Father

My father was a police officer, a man whose work required him to walk towards danger on behalf of people he had never met. He was the bravest and strongest person I knew. That same courage was also what took him from us.

I was five when he died, young enough that some memories of him exist more as sensations than facts: the crisp darkness of his uniform, the badge glinting on his chest,

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the way his presence filled a doorway. His presence made our small living room feel protected, as though nothing truly terrible could cross the threshold while he stood there.

Children are supposed to believe in this sort of magic. It is one of the few luxuries afforded to them before adulthood arrives with its paperwork, disappointments and inexplicably complicated tax filings.

After his death, the house changed. Conversations became quieter. The ticking clock seemed to measure time in heavy seconds, and the air itself felt altered, dense with everything we could not say. His absence was not vague or fragmentary. It was enormous.

Every milestone carried a shadow. When I first rode a bicycle without training wheels, I remember the cold handlebars beneath my hands and the thrilling terror of moving forward alone.

Losing a parent so young does something particular to a person’s foundations. Somewhere in theory, there is another version of me, one whose father lived to see her grow up. I sometimes imagine her wandering through a parallel universe, blissfully unaware of the emotional obstacle course assigned to this one.

Instead, I grew around a void, and that void became one of the earliest architects of my identity. It also left space for a darker presence to enter our family later, one that slowly chipped away at the hope of a young household already doing its best with damaged tools.

I learned early that tragedy was not reserved for distant families in sombre newspaper articles. It could happen to mine. It already had.

Growing Up with a Single Mother

My childhood and adolescence were traumatic, but they were not without joy. Human lives are inconveniently resistant to simple categories. Even in a house shaped by grief, there was music, imagination, laughter and the glorious cultural chaos of the 1990s and early 2000s.

There was the greatest music of the era playing in my mother’s blue Golf 3. There was primary school in Yellowwood Park, a small suburb that seemed to have been plucked from a film set. There was punk rock and the dramatic arrival of Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, whose collective message appeared to be that everyone was furious and this could best be expressed through baggy trousers and piercings.

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There were holidays at our timeshare in San Lamer, filled with the smell of sunblock and pool chlorine. My sister and I woke at six in the morning to swim, while evenings meant watching films with my brother and tackling the board games available to us. We built Lego, collected cars and marvelled at my brother’s first Packard Bell computer as if he had acquired a small spacecraft.

Then came DStv in 2001, before many people we knew had it. MTV, VH1 and Nickelodeon opened glowing portals in our living room. Television was an escape, and nobody could take it from us, not even my mother’s spectacularly useless narcissistic partner, a man who seemed to have arrived from the wrong side of every conceivable track. If his stellar personality was any indication. This man had the emotional range of a stapler. It is true that alcohol depletes every braincell. That is, if he had any to begin with.

The safest place was my grandparents’ home in Pietermaritzburg, where we spent school holidays enveloped in a particular kind of warmth. My grandfather on my mum’s side encouraged my imagination until it became gloriously unrestrained. Under his influence, the ordinary world grew secret doors. Gardens became kingdoms, household objects acquired motives, and reality was revealed to be merely one suggestion among many.

Back home, we played outside in our residential complex with the other children until we were called in for supper. Those hours belonged to us. We created entire civilisations between the houses, governed by rules of our own invention and generally with greater competence than many actual governments.

My mother carried the weight of my father’s death while raising my siblings and me largely alone. I watched her grieve and function simultaneously. Through her, I came to understand that strength is not the absence of pain. It is making breakfast while your heart is broken because children still need to eat and cereal remains absurdly indifferent to tragedy.

She was my first model of resilience.

Her grief also made her vulnerable. Eventually, she entered a relationship with a man whose narcissism reshaped our household.

I do not use that description casually. I mean the exhausting pattern of someone who must remain at the centre of every room, who manipulates instead of communicating and who makes others doubt their perceptions in order to maintain control. He behaved as though the rest of us were supporting characters in a poorly written drama whose only purpose was to admire his suffering. He entered a small, broken family who was

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touched by tremendous tragedy and seemed to believe that the world owed him something in return. He benefited from a life he had never known before: a civilised one, free from violence, alcoholism and abuse. Yet he brought the baggage of his sordid past with him, tainting our world like thick black smoke creeping over everything that should have been good.

He drained the joy from every happy occasion. He controlled everything we did and punished us for offences as trivial as leaving the toothpaste open. His shortcomings became our fault, and his failures became ours to carry. He had come from a broken marriage and had a son he barely saw. Alcoholism formed the backdrop to his entire existence, and he seemed determined to amount to nothing more than the life he had already lived.

We represented everything he did not deserve and could never live up to. We were everything he would never be, and he resented my siblings and me for it. Quite frankly, he resented my mother too, perhaps most of all, because she had given him a life he could neither appreciate nor sustain.

We endured twelve miserable years of his torment. It did not take long for my brother and me to begin standing up to him at every opportunity. We ridiculed his absurd tyranny whenever we could, small acts of defiance against a man who demanded absolute control.

The hardest part of his departure was that my brother and I had to do the dirty work ourselves. We had to make him leave. Had we not done so, he might never have left at all.

Living in that environment taught me to read moods before I could properly understand them. I became an emotional weather forecaster, constantly monitoring the pressure in a room and preparing for storms no one else would acknowledge.

I learned to become quiet when the atmosphere changed. I made myself small. I managed other people’s feelings before attending to my own. These strategies protected me as a child, but survival skills are peculiar creatures. If kept too long, they begin demanding promotions. What once protected me would eventually help shape the relationships I accepted as an adult.

Repeating the Pattern

It is both humbling and painful to grow up surrounded by a destructive pattern and then discover that you have repeated it. Life apparently enjoys irony, although its comic timing can be appalling.

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My husband and I met when we were twenty-three. We seemed compatible, and where we differed, we cared enough about one another to compromise. At twenty-four, we moved to another city and began building a life together.

Over the years, we faced circumstances that would test any relationship. My mother became seriously ill and died. We struggled with infertility, underwent IVF, and endured the birth and death of our baby. For a long time, I believed these tragedies were what had damaged our relationship.

Eventually, I had to confront a more difficult truth. The relationship had been organised around one person carrying most of its emotional and financial weight, and that person was me.

When I began recognising patterns similar to those I had witnessed in childhood, I realised the signs had been present for years. I had not understood them as warnings because they felt familiar. What should have set off alarms had instead registered as home.

Familiarity is often mistaken for safety. The nervous system is not a philosopher. It does not ask whether a pattern is healthy. It merely recognises the furniture.

The relationship gradually took something from me before I fully understood what was happening. My self-esteem eroded. My needs began to seem unreasonable, even to me. I developed the persistent conviction that I was somehow at fault, as though I had been appointed Chief Executive Officer of Everything That Went Wrong.

Eventually, I recognised that I was reliving a cycle I had learned in childhood. Naming it was one of the hardest and most important things I have ever done. It meant admitting that the survival strategies that once protected me had quietly become blueprints for my adult relationships.

Breaking that pattern required more than willpower. It required honest reflection, support and the deliberate unlearning of behaviours that had once kept me safe. Healing was not a heroic charge into battle. It was closer to negotiating with a committee of frightened ghosts, all of whom had strong opinions and no intention of keeping to the agenda. After twelve years together, I filed for divorce at the same time that I tragically lost my brother.

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Navigating Loss and Grief

When I was twenty-eight, my mother developed a terminal autoimmune disease. My siblings, members of her family, and I became her caregivers while she withered away in the ICU.

At the same time that I was trying to rebuild my sense of self, I was watching my mother’s body fail. The two processes ran beside each other, each making the other more difficult. I was tending to her physical needs while attempting to understand my own emotional ones, a division of labour for which no person is adequately trained.

Caregiving asks everything of you. It asks you to remain strong in front of the person before whom you most want to collapse. It turns love into schedules, medication and vigilance. It makes ordinary life feel vaguely obscene. People continue complaining about traffic and discussing weekend plans while your private world is ending by degrees.

When my mother died, the loss did not arrive alone. It stacked itself on top of my father’s death, the damage of the relationship I was still trying to understand, and every earlier grief I had never fully processed.

Grief compounds. It does not wait politely for you to finish mourning the previous loss. It has no respect for queues, which is particularly un-British of it.

Around the same period, I was confronting infertility, the quiet and private grief of wanting to become a mother while my body resisted that wish month after month.

Infertility is a loss without a funeral. There are no casseroles delivered to the door, no established rituals and very few words that do not sound painfully inadequate. The world continues to treat pregnancy as an ordinary biological event while, for you, it becomes a distant and heavily guarded kingdom.

I carried much of that grief alone, alongside everything else. It took me years to realise that my infertility was caused by the amount of stress I was under in my marriage.

Hope and Heartbreak: The IVF Journey

Eventually, my husband and I turned to IVF. In reality, I was the one who pursued and financed the process, while he remained an observer.

The process was defined by the strange coexistence of hope and fear. Every appointment offered the possibility of good news, and every good sign was shadowed by the knowledge of Hope became a nervous little creature that I fed carefully, afraid it

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might grow too large and attract the attention of fate. I also found myself wildly drawn to The Vampire Diaries and The Twilight Saga, an obsession I blamed entirely on the hormones. When I finally became pregnant, it felt like the first unambiguously good thing that had happened in a long time, though part of me remained acutely aware of how much could still go wrong.

Then came PPROM, preterm premature rupture of membranes, and the beginning of the hardest chapter of my life.

My baby was born far too early and spent two months in the NICU. For those two months, I lived in a suspended world where hope and despair could occupy the same hour, sometimes the same minute.

The NICU has its own language. Oxygen saturation. Feeding tubes. Isolettes. Numbers and alarms become oracles, and parents learn to interpret every flicker on a monitor as though deciphering messages from an anxious mechanical god.

I learned that vocabulary because I had to. I learned to hope in small, disciplined doses because too much hope felt dangerous, while abandoning it felt like abandoning my baby.

My baby died after those two months.

There is no clean way to write that sentence because there was no clean way to live it. Language approaches such a loss, falters, and stands uselessly at the door.

That death reshaped my nervous system, my sense of safety and my understanding of what the world could take from someone who had already lost so much. It is the loss that changed me most permanently.

People often reach for comforting phrases when confronted with this kind of grief. They want to find meaning, because meaning makes tragedy feel governed by rules. They say everything happens for a reason, as though somewhere in the celestial civil service there is a folder explaining why a baby had to die.

I have never found that folder.

What I found instead was love with nowhere physical to go, grief too large to contain, and the slow realisation that surviving a loss does not mean resolving it. Some losses become part of the body. They are carried rather than overcome.

We held a small funeral for our little Eliyana at my brother's home and had her cremated. My brother was my lighthouse through this storm. I looked to him to get through this torment and he showed up in every essence of the phrase. He made all the

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funeral arrangements and fetched my baby’s ashes the next day. After the longest day of my life, I returned home with no appetite and anxiety engulfing me. Then my breast milk began leaking through my clothes, a devastating physical reminder that my baby was gone. In that moment, I completely fell apart. If there was ever a time for the earth to swallow me whole, it was now. This was a cruel joke.

The Loss of My Brother

Before I had found solid ground again, my brother died by suicide.

His death was violent and devastating. By the time I arrived, his body had been taken to the morgue, leaving only the aftermath. The house felt unnaturally still, yet the silence roared in my ears. Every room carried the weight of what had happened.

The bathroom was the worst of it. A metallic smell lingered in the air, raw and unsettling. The light exposed every grim reminder, turning the room into a place that felt haunted by his final moments. His absence seemed tangible, like a shadow waiting in the corners.

The news shattered the fragile peace our family had managed to assemble. His death broke something in us that I am not sure can ever be fully repaired. We became like a mirror smashed into countless pieces, each fragment reflecting part of the family we had been but no longer fitting neatly beside the others.

Grieving a suicide carries its own particular weight. There are questions that return endlessly and refuse to answer themselves. There is guilt, which wraps around warm memories until even happiness feels dangerous. There is anger, arriving without invitation and then behaving as though it owns the place.

There is also the cruel social awkwardness surrounding suicide. People lower their voices. They search for acceptable phrases. Some withdraw because they do not know what to say, as though grief might be contagious or require specialist conversational equipment.

What I needed was not a perfect explanation. None existed. I needed people willing to remain present in the absence of one.

In the aftermath, my sister and I found each other in a new way. We had always been close, but grief made us essential to one another. We were two survivors washed ashore after the same shipwreck, each carrying pieces of a world that no longer existed.

We did not need to explain the precise shape of the loss. We already knew it.

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Leaning on her taught me that grief can be shared. Sharing it does not make the burden disappear, but it changes how it is carried. Sometimes resilience is not standing alone. Sometimes it is allowing another person to take one handle of something impossibly heavy.

Building a Life from the Pieces

I no longer believe resilience means remaining unbroken. I think it is what gets built, slowly and imperfectly, from the pieces.

Every loss took something from me. Surviving them also taught me what I could not have learned in any other way: how patterns are inherited, how self-worth is eroded, and how enduring pain differs from allowing pain to define an entire life.

Mental health awareness and self-care stopped being abstract concepts and became necessities, as fundamental as food and sleep. Therapy, honest conversations and the slow unlearning of old survival strategies became the tools of my rebuilding.

This work was rarely dramatic. There were no orchestras swelling in the background, no wise wizard arriving with the final answer, and no montage in which decades of trauma were resolved before the credits. Healing was repetitive, ordinary and often inconvenient.

It was learning that saying no did not cause the sky to split open.

It was recognising when I was taking responsibility for another adult’s emotions.

It was noticing the frightened child within me who still believed safety depended on keeping everyone else calm.

It was allowing that child to rest.

I also discovered an unexpected depth of empathy. Having lived through so much loss, I recognise pain in others more readily. I know better than to offer easy comfort where none exists. Human beings are flawed, contradictory creatures. We hurt one another, often while trying desperately not to be hurt ourselves. We repeat what we have learned until someone finds the courage to ask whether the lesson was wrong.

Empathy does not require excusing harmful behaviour. It means understanding that people can be wounded and still responsible for the wounds they cause. It means seeing complexity without surrendering boundaries.

My life has been marked by losses that, when listed together, can seem impossible for one person to carry: a father gone too soon, a childhood shaped by manipulation, a

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mother’s death, infertility, the death of my baby, the end of my marriage and my brother’s suicide.

Yet I am still here.

I am still building a life. I am still capable of love, laughter and hope, although hope and I now maintain a more cautious arrangement. It no longer arrives like a triumphant trumpet blast. It appears in smaller forms: an honest conversation, a boundary held, a memory that brings warmth before pain, or a morning when getting out of bed feels possible.

Healing is not a destination. It is unfinished, ordinary work, easier on some days than on others. It is not a straight road but a peculiar forest path that occasionally doubles back, vanishes beneath the undergrowth or leads to a talking fox with deeply unhelpful opinions.

Resilience is not about pretending the forest is harmless. It is knowing what lives there and continuing to walk.

My broken pieces have not disappeared. Slowly, they have settled into a foundation, proof that profound sorrow and genuine hope can be held in the same hands. They remind me that survival does not have to look graceful. Then again, carrying this much sorrow has left me with a wicked sense of humour and tattoos that tell my story, even if they make me look a little like a hardened criminal.

Sometimes survival is simply standing amid the ruins, making coffee, and deciding that the story is not over.

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About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious platform that celebrates the art of storytelling and poetic expression. This competition offers writers and poets from around the world an opportunity to showcase their unique voices and creative talents. It is a celebration of literary excellence that fosters a global community of artists dedicated to sharing compelling narratives and exploring the vast landscape of human experience through the written word.

Thank you, Yourisha Pillay, for sharing your powerful essay, "Navigating a Life of Loss and Resilience," with the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Your courage in recounting such personal experiences and your insight into the strength found in resilience offer readers profound reflections on the human condition. We appreciate your contribution to this celebration of creativity and look forward to witnessing the continued impact of your work.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.