Grief Diary

Ma passed away at 12:49am on Thursday 26/02/26.

Nothing prepared me for this loss. I was going sick with worry as to how I would manage her once she came home from the hospital. Would I hire nurses, would I stay at 2B? What about her dialysis? I was thinking about petty things like finances. And then she just passed away. In front of my eyes...with the doctors performing CPR on her body and with me muttering 'please please please' standing at the foot of her bed.

The next few hours were a lucid blur. I was crying and then pulling myself back together to sign countless forms and complete the formalities. I recall that Jojo and I went back to Ma's flat to wait for the 4 hours they take to declare a person officially dead. During those hours I messaged friends and family members, knowing full well that it was the middle of the night and most of them would possibly get the news the next morning. The hospital asked for a set of clothes and without much thought I pulled out a good kurti and leggings set of hers and went and gave it to the hospital.

They kept her in the morgue from 5am on the 26th to 5pm on the 27th. By that time my sister had reached home. I hugged her and cried. I kept crying multiple times every day. Every few hours I broke down and cried. 

The cremation was psychologically a mammoth task for me. I was surrounded by friends and family but I felt so bereft and lost. My mother lay on a wooden frame on the floor, covered in a red and white saree, sindoor smeared on her forehead, eyes shut and nostrils blocked with cotton. It was too much to bear. My insides were twisting in pain. While crying I could feel my heart being wrung out but never enough. Crying didn't get rid of the pain. The pain persisted. It's still there as I am writing this 20 days after her passing.

After the cremation, the next morning my sister and I went to inform my father of my mother's passing. He howled and cried, we hugged him and cried too. It was unbearable. 

Then we became extremely busy setting things up for the funerary arrangements. Despite being busy I found it difficult to live, to breathe, to eat and go sleep. My mind would throw up images from the hospital or the cremation. Words of consolation that she did not suffer or that she was in a better place, did not matter as I just wanted her back. I wanted to talk to her again. I wanted to tell her our plans for Dad, the matter she was so worried about. I wanted her opinion on her own funeral. I wanted her to vet the guest list and guide me regarding the food and flowers. But she was gone. 

That crashing realisation gets me even today. It's like my consciousness is like a droplet of water in the sea...it becomes part of a wave and periodically the wave crashes into the rocks which are the cold hard unyielding truth of my mother's demise. It hurts every time my consciousness faces that truth. Mornings are the toughest. Waking up to realise that she is no more and never will be. My well-wisher, my friend, my confidante, my guide...was gone forever.

I felt a sense of doom akin to fear. It was a hollowness in my ribcage and a dull but powerful ache in my chest. It was constant. I always felt close to years. I felt as though a great danger had befallen me and I was very afraid. 

Through all of this, I kept showing up for my sister, my family at 5B, for my child. I tried to work sporadically. I accomplished a lot of tasks with regard to our father's rehabilitation and matters regarding mother's financial affairs. I cannot begin to explain how I could. At any point of time, all I wanted to do was to lie down in an empty room, undisturbed with my thoughts and having the space to cry or just mourn silently.

I remember going out for work a day or two after the funeral and noticing that the sunlight felt less bright, the street sounds felt muted, that all stimuli had faded into the background. It was like being on drugs, I could tell that grief had altered my brain chemistry. My recurring thoughts about my own death became incessant. I just wanted to not be here. Here, where everything was going on exactly as it did when my mother was around. My world has shattered.... everything else was the same.

World War III was in the pipelines. The news of death, bombing, fuel shortage and outright mayhem barely affected my mind. I even sadistically felt that now that my mother was gone the world could burn for all I cared. My social media algorithm quickly caught on to the fact that I was grieving and started peppering my feed with videos by experts and aesthetic lists by psychologists about grief. I won't say it didn't help. It was what I felt like consuming at the time.

Overall, I was conscious of having a brain fog so dense that in idle times I would feel that my entire face was sloughing off my bones. My brain cells would flatten in the inactivity and I could feel the depression creeping around my insides. 

Days passed inexorably. Nothing was worthwhile. I functioned normally. Went out for lunches and dinners, took counselling sessions for clients, interacted with family members, smiles and cracled jokes.....all while my heart was hurting inside. I recall having a dinner with friends, being a perfect hostess and then coming home and bursting into tears in bed.

My 4.5 year old took my tears really hard. He would try to console me by saying that he and his Dad were now my mamma so that I would just stop being so sad. When I would start sobbing in bed at night while lying beside him, he would run and fetch his father. Like a little animal going to fetch help to save his mommy. It was so heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. I hated myself for openly grieving in front of him but I couldn't control myself on certain occasions. 

To say it was tough is an understatement. I would get flashbacks of her dying in the ICU or her lying in the glass van or on the crematorium floor. I started saying 'Ma' out loud while walking on the roads, while showering, whenever I was alone. Everything fed directly into my depressive brain. I could feel the feelings dragging me lower and lower. And yet, I woke up, I showed up, I tried my best and I missed her with every fibre of my being.

I love you Ma...goodbye!