Arti shares her experience of the kindness that can sometimes accompany your grief, and shares her poetry book on grief and healing.

Are you forgetting them? I promise, the more you look, the more you’ll find. The grief is always with you but sometimes it’s being kind to you.

Grief can look like living your best life, new moments rushing by, a blur of the next thing to occupy your mind. And then that scary moment, the one where you realise you’ve forgotten to think about them today or in the last few hours. It’s been years, but you still chide yourself as if it were yesterday when you lost them, your grief went from this roaring silence, to aching for someone to ask about them, to having a loved one or stranger telling you a story about the person you’ve lost that you’d never heard, so they could be alive again through somebody else’s tales. Even though they are gone, you’re still getting to know them.

Learning to survive

And the only way you know how to survive their death and your grief? To live. To breathe in the memories, exhale whenever you do something which sparks the memories of them; by the patio door feeding birds, or rolling out the perfectly shaped small rotis, or tucking the kids into bed tightly and retelling your favourite fairy tale for the umpteenth time. Or walking for hours on end so you can keep exploring the world for them. Or realising a dad (not yours) is about to grab the mic, and make dad jokes (no idea what those are…), and talk about how he’s so proud of his daughter on her wedding day, and you’re hiding at the back, by the closest exit, so that you don’t hear a beat of it. And you keep these ‘hiding’ moments to yourself, not saying a word, because nobody deserves to know you in all of your grief. It’s private, just for you and them. 

Your grief is never going to look like someone else’s and there’s this need to be scared to live your life, as if all these eyes are quietly saying ‘how dare you make new memories’, how dare you create a new path, try to fill that very tangible void they left in your day-to-day life. How selfish, how wrong. And it does feel wrong, at first. But then slowly and surely you realise that everything you do has their trademark. The people who raised you left you with something; an appreciation for how precious life is. 

And so you live

I wrote a poetry book on grief and healing through travel this year and I wanted it to show all the happiness and hope as well as that dark pit that grief is usually associated with (and rightly so, it’s tough to get out of that sticky mind sand).

When I was writing Seasons of Grief, I had to question myself a few times on why some of my poetry was so happy and hopeful in light of the subject matter – I even talk about it as travel poetry rather than grief poetry whenever the word feels heavy – but I guess it’s a nice reminder that those people who we lost also made us feel light, their presence a safe space for us to be who we are, and in turn, it’s okay for grief to feel like that lightness. It’s okay to feel alive.

Arti Rajput

If you’d like to share your story with us, please email blog@letstalkaboutloss.org.

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