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Here's how I imagined losing my mother would go.
I would be by her side, through the final days, attending to every need.
I would tell her I loved her, when it was time.
I would say a prayer as she floated away, before assembling the family for
a stately funeral, bedecked with her favorite flowers.
I would be soft but steely, raw but
ready, beaned but prepared.
Here's what actually happened.
I got a call in the middle of an interview that my mother had a stroke,
then spent 30 hours on a plane from California to Karachi, arranging for
a ventilator, while my mother heaved her final few breaths.
I found out she was already dead when I walked out of the airport,
sat confused inside a morgue, refusing to recognize her frozen body.
Then when the house was nearly empty, I went into my mother's room and
I searched for her.
I searched on her bed, under her bed, in the bathroom, behind the curtains,
behind the doors, and when I did not find her, I dissolved into a heap,
screaming for her so violently, that my uncle who lived next door ran over to hold
me as I shook with sorrow, greater than anything my body could hold.
I didn't want to wake up, or keep going,
but I chose a grave, I kissed my mother's face for
the last time, before covering it with a white sheet,
and I got back on a plane to resume my MBA.
Everyone congratulated me for holding up well, and
I inferred that holding up well, at least publicly, was the thing to do.
Everyone also moved on from my mother's death, everyone, but me.
Condolences dwindled, flowers wilted,
just as my both funeral adrenaline began to fade.
There were no more logistics, no more decisions,
no more questions, except for, what the hell was wrong with me?
My heart thundered at every phone ring, expecting more bad news.
My brain was blanketed in fog.
My throat was so tight, that breathing felt labored.
Now, I'm the kind of person who has a backup plan for
her backup plan, and I had no patience for this lethargy,
this obliviousness, and I decided I was going to get over grief.
I hunted down medical journals, self-help books,
essays, and I began diagnosing myself.
I discovered that when I was drifting listlessly, hours after my mother's death,
unable to feel, I was in phase one of grief, numbness.
A narcotic regression of sorts, as my brain tried to absorb the blow.
When I was calling for my mother in our home,
after seeing her corpse in the morgue, or following butterflies and
birds around Stanford in case she had sent them my way,
I was in phase two of grief, yearning and searching.
My constant chokehold was globus pharyngis.
My fear of phone calls was anticipatory grief,
an attempt by my brain and body never to be caught off-guard again.
My instinct to flee my own home, when my roommate innocently draped our
bathtub with a shower curtain, because I thought I was back in the morgue, and
there was a dead body beneath this white sheet too, that was grief-induced PTSD.
Grief, it turned out, was a bottomless inferno, desecrating my body and mind.
Grief, it turned out, was chronic.
I would never get over grief. I would never get my mother back.
I would never stop wanting my mother back.
Grief was there to goddamn stay.
Why then, weren't more people around me talking about grief?
When did we start censoring this ubiquitous, inevitable monster?
Well, there's actually an answer to my semi-rhetorical question.
The censorship of grief, began in the middle of the 20th century,
according to sociologist because of two big shifts in society.
The dawn of the hospital as a place for the dying, and
the growing conviction that life should be, above all, happy.
By 1950, the site of death had been displaced from the home to the hospital.
Until then, people usually died in their own bed, surrounded by loved ones.
But with modern medicine, families began handing over responsibility for
their dying, to hospitals.
We entered an era of medicalized death, or as Philip Aires calls it,
forbidden death, where it was suddenly possible to purge our homes and
avert our eyes from the shocking extinguishing of consciousness.
That's exactly what we did, especially after Norman Peale's 1952 book,
The Power of Positive Thinking, catapulted us down a decade's long inexhaustible,
well of optimism.
By the 70s, we were vying for endless economic growth and
limitless life optimization.
By the 90s, the American Psychology Association, had termed sadness and
pessimism as learned behaviors.
By 2006, Rhonda Byrne's popular book, The Secret, claimed that
a universal law of attraction, materially rewards positive thinking.
Our voracious appetite for positivity and productivity,
together with the segregation of homes and hospitals along lines of life and
death, relegated grief into obscurity.
Sadness was voluntary,
death was invisible.
We will forever joyous,
young, immortal.
Except, we are not.
Every 26 seconds, someone dies of COVID-19 in America,
the most powerful, affluent economy in the entire world.
50 Americans have died of COVID-19, since I started talking today.
Death is so inescapable, that we drift in and out of varying degrees of lockdown,
depending on just how many people have died of late.
We could continue segregating ourselves into those who can turn away from grief,
and those who are drowning in it, doctors, nurses,
funeral workers, nursing homes, bereaved families,
or we could recognize the realities of grief.
We could recognize that grief isn't meant to be heroic.
And calling doctors and nurses superhuman, for
sacrificing everything in the face of this virus, denies them basic human empathy.
We could recognize that grief is doled out disproportionately to the already
marginalized.
Compared to white Americans, black, native, and
Hispanic Americans are three times more likely to die of COVID-19.
We could recognize that grief is not just mental, it is physical too.
The grieving lose appetite, memory, oxygen, sleep,
they forget how to read and drive.
They get strange ear infections from unshed tears.
We could recognize that grief is not meant to be something you bounce back from.
And for 10 to 20% of us, grief turns pathological,
pulling us into long-term depression, unless we get mental health support.
We could recognize that grief is not meant to be bottled up, and
telling those who are grieving that we are holding up well can feel coerced,
a demand that we suffer in silence without interrupting the enjoyment of others.
We could recognize our own agency to support
the grieving by asking them questions about the ones that they lost.
Creating rituals in their memory, marking death anniversaries,
the way we do birthdays and weddings.
We could recognize that grieve demands time, but
49 out of 50 US states have no bereavement leave.
And the federal Family Medical Leave Act, which gives us 12 weeks off, when
we care for an ailing relative, doesn't give us a single day off if they die.
After losing my mother, I resented feeling
like I had been yanked away from my own life, uprooted, undone.
I couldn't wrap my mind around the breathtaking finality of death.
Death felt like an anomaly.
I now know death is not an anomaly.
Death is the usual order of the universe.
I now know grief is not shameful.
Grief is just another form of love.
Grief should not be censored.
No form of censorship has ever really been effective.
So I'm here today, standing before you, talking about my darkest days.
I'm here today asking you to make room for the grieving.
I'm here today asking you to make room for grief.
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