One Day At A Time- An Essay On Grief

By Keya Pothen

On July 15, 2022, I lost my father. While I was typing the year, I had to take a second because my memory failed me. I had to take a second when I realised that this year, 2024, it will be two years. It doesn't feel like that. It still feels like it happened just yesterday. Time will heal everything? Yeah, right? Time passes, and all I can think about are the moments in the day when you’re missing, when I can't call you. Where I can still hear your voice ringing in my ears, but I can't catch it. The reality of your absence in the physical realm is becoming unavoidable. 

I have felt grief before. In lost loves, in my lost dogs. But not like this. I feel like a broken compass constantly trying to find my North. Yes, there are days when I smile because I think I’ve found it. The smile left my face as quickly as it came. Because I remember, again. I feel guilty. How can I be happy in a world that is void of you? 

I try to be grateful. I am. For your love. For the ability for me to say out loud to the world that you are my best friend. Am I mad because I still can’t say it in the past tense?

Am I mad for feeling you enveloping me like a warm hug on a cold, lonely day, so close yet so far away?

Call me a loner. Yes, I have my friends, my support system. But I have spent most of my life, even now, in solitude, lost in my mind, making bargains, finding solace in my thoughts, but also finding madness in the recurring loop of them. 

Grasping. Searching. Craving. Trying to find the magic of your lingering presence in simple things like a gush of wind or a solitary butterfly looping around me. In a crow that visits me, sitting at my window on the air conditioner unit staring at me whilst I twirl an agarbati in loops at three pictures of you on a mantle above my bed, begging for your return, for your help. For your protection. 

I have written six chapters of this story in a timeline. I can’t find the right words now. This happens a lot. My memory fails me quite a bit these days.  I have written 6 chapters of this story of losing you, but the thought of having to sit down to continue it is. To finish it. Bears a huge weight that forces me to procrastinate and avoid it. Today, I decided enough is enough. 

I will start this story fresh. Maybe it will help. Writing has always helped me. Words find their way on paper, or in this case, my keyboard, on a digital file, always. I can process it. A slight load lifted off from this burden, I feel guilty to say I am carrying. 

The world has not been the same since you left it. At least, not for me. For everyone else, everyone who was there that day. That day, when you lay in a golden box with glass windows in the middle of the hallway of your hard-earned house, unmoving but at peace. For them, the world has continued to turn. I feel like I’m sitting on a broken Ferris wheel that turns on wobbly spokes. Sometimes, if only for a moment, slightly smooth but then back to its wobbly turns. Screeching, so loud at times, it's hard for me to admire the view or take in the sights of the world around me. 

People around the world experience loss every day. Am I so self-involved to feel this so deeply? For it to now become a huge part of who I am. Of the way I carry myself? This question plagues my mind every day. Especially louder on the days when I don't feel so numb. But then I hear a voice telling me it isn't a competition. A loss is a loss, and I’ve just got to feel it. How hard it hits me is all the validation I need. Because denying the pain I feel has got me nowhere.

People have felt loss before. But they wake up and take on the day. How do they do it? 

I feel like the Ferris wheel that is my mind currently might just run off track and roll away into the abyss. Never to return. 

I like to imagine a life with you still in it. Where would I be right now? Would I still be at that job, slogging away but earning well, calling you every day to tell you of the creative solutions I’ve found to market that brand? It all feels irrelevant. So unimportant. It didn't then. Now, it makes no sense to me. What is the point?

I like to imagine a life with you still in it. Where would I be right now? Would the veil have cleared like it did for me to find who my true friends were? Like this storm of losing you did to me? Would I have lost so much in that first year you were gone if you were still here? So protected, I didn't have to think about protecting myself. 

I remember I used to pray every night before I fell asleep. A prayer I was taught as a child. I don’t remember who taught it to me. It goes like “Thank you, God, for the world so sweet.”

I need to stop here for a second because a honeybee has flown through my hair so gently and now sits struggling on my window. It was so gentle that I thought it was a fly. Till I turned to look to see if the fly was trapped and needed my help. I can’t help a stinging bee without hurting myself. I guess I can apply that realisation to my life. I am scared. But in this moment, like I said before, I ask, is that you? Are you validating this moment right now? This action that I’m choosing to take? Is it you offering me support through this extremely difficult method of catharsis? Are you teaching me something, giving me these seemingly profound thoughts?

I will get back to the prayer now. The bee is still flying about in case you’re wondering. I feel guilty for not being able to help it because of my fear of being stung. I can’t help it without being stung. But I am used to this guilt. It has plagued me for a while. I see you in every living being. The ugly and the beautiful. The harmless and the harmful. I see you in it, and it makes me gentler. I cannot rid a spider from my bathroom, a daddy longleg, because I see you in it. 

I feel by ridding myself of it that I am ridding myself of you.

The prayer I used to say every night before I closed my eyes went like this, “Thank you, God, for the world so sweet, Thank you, God, for the food we eat. Thank you, God, for the birds that sing. Thank you, God, for everything.” To this prayer, I would add. “Thank you, God, for keeping mamma and pappa safe. That is all I ask. Please keep them safe.” Once my dog Snowy was added to the little mix of our nuclear family. The prayer found an addition to her. 

I stopped saying that prayer for a while after that day. It felt futile. What was the point? My worst nightmare had come to life. I used to think that I didn't need anyone or anything as long as I had them. But now, there’s a gaping hole in where you used to be. 

You used to talk to me about death. Quite often. A morbid fantasy, that’s what I called it, of how you would like to go. That day, I was grateful for those conversations because if there was one thing I could control, it was respecting those final wishes. Dare anyone say otherwise? And oh, did they try. I was so weak, yet I was so strong in protecting those final moments of you. 

I am scared. I am scared to lose the closeness I still feel to you. I can still almost touch and feel the last hug and kiss I gave you. And then I pray that it never fades away. Ten years down the line, will I still feel it? I pray I do because that feeling holds a bit of my sanity. 

Some days pass where I am joyful in my remembrance of you. And there are days when I’m flooded with guilt. The guilt of being so consumed with my new job and life that I didn't prioritise meeting you every day because I truly believed I had more time. And then you left, and I realised it had been weeks since I had hugged you or kissed you, and now all that is left is the memory of me kissing your cold, lifeless skin. 

Guilt is all-consuming. It takes over my entire day. I shake my head like a nervous twitch. Trying desperately to shake the feeling off. I know that no good will come of it. What’s done is done! But it’s a cut that never stops itching. Does that mean it’s healing? A cut usually itches when it’s in its stage of healing, right?

What usually follows my guilt is all of the things we never did. We never went on that holiday to Italy like I wanted. Time never gave in. Or was it us? Did we both think there would be more time for that?

There are so many questions that plague my mind with no answers. Because you were the person I talked to about life and death, and it would've been you to give me these answers I am searching for. This kind of pain was and could only be soothed by you. 

I remember when I hated myself and was drowning in a spiral of darkness fuelled by self-loathing. It was you who brought me back up. You gave me the tools to swim to the surface and breathe on my own. It’s probably the reason why I am still standing today. A fake smile plastered across my face as I now try desperately to find joy in the day-to-day workings of my existence minus you. 

What keeps me afloat is my belief that you are now omniscient and omnipotent. My God. My protector, working from behind the scenes as you watch me. The belief that you now get to see me. Really see me for who I am. In all my layers. Watching down on me and making tweaks here and there, protecting me with subtle nudges in the right direction. 

I have to believe that there is life beyond death. It is the only thing that keeps me afloat. 

So, I talk to you. I ask you for help and protection. I ask you to give me the strength to love myself. I never truly did, but I feel your love for me around me, and that transpires into what I can only call a newfound love of self. 

The wallpaper on my phone is a picture of you. A picture I found in your phone that you took of yourself. It keeps me grounded. I look at it often, and I feel protected. 

I guess I use my belief in your all-encompassing presence to fill in all the spaces I found you missing when you were alive. The things I wish you did as a father, I use now.

In death, my mind makes you an even better father than you were in life. Always present, always protecting and always aware of my thoughts and feelings. 

When you were alive, as much as I did tell you, there were certain things I never could, but that's just a parent-child thing. Now, I tell you everything. Now, there’s no hiding. No fibbing. 

You see everything. 

I imagine you sitting on a throne surrounded by the friends you lost to death, watching me and laughing at the ridiculousness of my sometimes very apparent naivety. 

I picture you watching me, proud. When I make decisions in honour of myself. Things I found hard to do as a people pleaser before I morphed into this new person. 

It’s the magic that you still exist beyond life that keeps me going every day. That has me sitting here writing this, believing it is the tool to help me process this. My catharsis. 

I put these words on paper, consumed by an image of you reading them as I write them down. 

These words appear in thin air in front of you as you sit on your throne. 

I have always lived with a part of me in the clouds. It is these fantasies that turn this situation into something poetic. It keeps me from turning cynical. 

I could just say a person I loved was born and then he died. That is it. And move on. But I have always been a feeling person, and because of that, I don't just miss you. My entire being yearns for you as I wish you into situations and experiences that you should've been there for. Hearing your laugh resonates in my ears. I attempt to will you into existence, if only just in my mind. 

Romanticising the loss of you keeps me afloat. I have to believe in life after death. I have to believe you listen when I talk to you. I have to believe that you are watching over me. 

Because without that belief, I would not survive. 

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By Keya Pothen