ten years of grief and healing
I have new grief. My dad died 10 years ago today in his ancestral home of India. Ten years later, my tears escalate when I think of his sudden death. This new grief surprises me, and it reminds me that my healing story is a love story.
A man who was diligent about his health and caring for himself entered his home country on vacation, intending to travel with my mom to places, provide donations and support to local communities, and attend family weddings. Instead, he got a cough, which turned into pneumonia, and devolved to him being on a ventilator and getting sepsis.
I was there, but it never felt real.
I accept that he’s gone, but the story I told myself was that he’d die in America in his old age, long after my mom. My mom, who only now has come to a place where she is prioritizing her health, was the one who didn’t care about herself, who wasn’t diligent. The stories and expectations we create protect us. The story of how I thought my dad would die protected me from the shock of him dying while we were on vacation in India, a trip where he wanted to share his abundance, not be robbed of his breath.
And I’d never believe this was a love story.
The other day I realized his death also was the birth of the dissolution of my marriage. My then-husband’s behavior, which I wrote about in more detail in “Will You Be Nice to Me?” (scroll to the 2nd story), felt like the biggest betrayal during one of the hardest times of my life. And yet, I now see it as a gift.
The birth of healing is painful.
Sometimes it’s sitting on a mattress and being coerced into being “nice” to your husband. Sometimes it’s feeling the discomfort and guilt of saying “no” to what you usually said “yes” to. Sometimes it’s having a panic attack on the couch when you get home from work, the body already knowing that something needs to change. Sometimes it’s yelling at your husband about how shitty he was to you while you’re buzzed on the drive home from your friend’s wedding and then sitting together uncomfortably in the baggage claim of LAX, but never feeling bad about it.
This loss plopped me to a place where I could no longer avoid myself, my wounds, or my shadows. This was the beginning of the end. It was the birth of a new family structure that, once again, was not the story I had in my head. Two of the most prominent masculine figures in my life became ghosts.
It might seem that this was the darkest of times, yet I also see it as an opening. This opening left me with my gnarliest wounds…my mother wound. My dad wasn’t a buffer anymore. I didn’t have a husband I could hide behind to avoid the mother-daughter relationship. The anger stage of my dad’s death was comprised of me saying “How could he leave me with her?” A new mirror was in front of me in every direction—a funhouse of control, criticism, gaslighting…and love.
There I go calling everything fucking “love” again.
When you’re forced to face something that recreated itself in romantic relationships, work relationships, and friendships, the only way out is through. We can never heal anything at once. While funhouse mirrors distort your own image, they also amplify certain parts. They reveal areas to look at more closely. Areas where love has been dismissed, ignored, teased.
I no longer had anyone one to hide behind. And my mom was hurting too. We were both experiencing parallel cycles of loss and rebirth.
This death anniversary has me on my knees, repeating so many moments. Telling my dad I loved him in the hospital, hoping he’d return to us. Hearing my mom wailing my dad’s name after he was declared dead. Imagining him walking into a hospital but losing capacity to breathe on his own within a day. Him leaving Chicago healthy af and never coming home.
It has me repeating moments with my ex-husband who was unwilling to eat with my family, who didn’t have capacity to support my grief, who I realized was incompatible with the Nisha I wanted to be—the Nisha I was. That’s not his fault. Who we truly were required something different than what we had.
What a trip.
What an opening.
What a life.
My dad and I before my bridal shower. [Image ID: A photo of Nisha and her father in her childhood home’s living room. She wears a coral dress with tan circles, and he wears a button up shirt with a pen in his shirt pocket and jeans.]
A decade later, I’m so happy to be close to my mom in physical and heart distance. I’ve moved from “How could he leave me with her?” to “How can I leave her?” I never thought I’d feel this way. But the funhouse mirrors gave me permission. They gave me a different way to look closer at my own participation in my suffering. Yes, my mom hurt me. But she didn’t owe me anything. Yes, my ex-husband hurt me. Bu the didn’t owe me anything. I began to get more curious about what I owed myself.
A community of care and love and curiosity was with me every step of the way. For this, I have endless gratitude. And I’m also proud of myself for sharing this all with others. I now see this as an act of reciprocity, one that held a great risk for how I outwardly spoke up about the wounds I tended to, the ones inflicted by my grieving mother and my estranged ex-husband.
My losses asked me to find the love droplets within myself and the love being gifted to me all around. It’s not that loss isn’t “supposed” to happen. It does happen. It will happen. What will you do with it?
Will you wish for what’s before? Or will you enter this scary funhouse, knowing that there’s a love story on the other side?
A decade later, thinking about the circumstances of my dad’s death floods me with a new shock. One that asks me to come to terms with it.
I recently spoke to a birth & death worker because I realized I needed more support to excavate this grief. They told me that grief is a way for us to remember who we are.
I remembered who I was as I asked for a separation and then for a divorce. And now I’m seeing myself from a new place of grief and healing…dreaming of the liminal spaces awaiting me.
Another healing cycle is on its way. The sheer emotion I felt a couple weeks ago thinking about my dad’s death proves that so much is hidden within our bodies. It can’t come up all at once because our body loves us and doesn’t intend to kill us with this overwhelm. So as scary as this new cycles feels, I also see it as exciting. I’m scared to see what’s there for me. I’m excited to see what’s there for me. They’re both the same when you decide to be with them.
This scary excitement reminds me that the stories that protect me are just stories. It’s okay to have them. But the stories that will be revealed are the most magical ones. My ancestors, including my father, denied their healing in an effort to survive.—to create a home and way of living for their progeny. Intergenerational healing has shown me that scary excitement is something to move toward because I am so safe, so loved, and as messy as it is, these are the stories worth melting into.
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