When we mourn someone we also mourn ourselves as we were and as we will never be again.
By Nazarul Islam
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long,” The immortal words remind us of Pablo Neruda the Chilean poet—in his beautiful poem: “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.”
True grief has no closure. We carry it with us like a gaping wound. Sometimes the end comes so fast and there is no time to transition from one phase to the other. It is a matter of wonder how a life spent together seems so brief, so infinitesimal.
Absence then becomes a haunting presence.
In those spaces of absence I hear the voice, the footsteps, I sense the presence and in my mind’s eye, the million expressions I knew – The smile, the glint of anger, the glow of happiness, and the gentleness of love. We filled in each other’s sentences and thoughts and our silences were companionable silences. We were each other’s souls, each other’s alter egos. People come and go offering their condolences and in spite of their best efforts but words seem too frail, too inadequate to assuage the pain.
And, the randomness of life, death comes unannounced when least expected. In the quiet aftermath, we realize that mortality is the stuff of life and the vanity of grieving for those we must soon follow
Love is an emotion that is larger than those who love because everyone has loved and ennobled it. The capacity of the human heart to love and grieve and carry pain and build memories in the ruins of loss is enormous. I understand the unreasonableness of, and the absurdity of longing for permanence in an ever-evolving world. We must accept the trauma of death we are all heir to, have the gratitude for what we had and understanding that nothing is meant to last.
When we mourn someone we also mourn ourselves as we were and as we will never be again. Nothing changes the inexorable laws of nature decree that the universe will run as it does, friends and strangers move on in their own orbits. We are but insignificant specs in the ominous scheme of things, prisoners of the human predicament.
In my naivete I ask myself, “how do the sunshine and the birds sing together, in my sorrow?”
No one could have expressed the colossal emptiness of life for those left behind better than the Hindi poet who eulogized his wife’s passing away:
Then…she was gone!
Others too gone, one by one
Many days and flocks of birds
Singing sweet melodies…were gone
Lakes and rivers dried, and gone
From this beautiful earth
After, she was gone!
[author title=”Nazarul Islam” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.[/author]
