About
“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
On January 2nd 2020, my Nani, Vidya Mansingh (also known as Ratna Shrivastava - short story, for another post) passed away. She was 79 years old and otherwise in decent health. Apart from the sheer shock, the thing that I struggled and continue to struggle with in the aftermath of her passing, is the sense of irretrievable loss. Vidya Mansingh lived a long and glorious life of 79 years. And yet, after its ultimate closure, except for our intangible memory what is there to show for it? On the other hand, what are we meant to do with the things that she left behind, the things that made her? And what of the conversations that were still to be had, the stories untold, to be told and retold? One day she was here, carrying with her everything that made up her life and the next day she was gone; her thoughts, her ideas, her experiences and the life that she had lived irretrievably lost. There was so much of her and then there was nothing at all, instantly creating a Nani-shaped hole in our homes and hearts.
In stark contrast, is my Nana. He is outliving his wife, but in the last five years has irretrievably lost and is still losing the things that made his life - his ideas, his experiences, his memory. If his life were a jigsaw puzzle, it would be like losing the pieces one at a time, gradually downsizing, making the picture unclear, eventually even unrecognizable. We lost her in a moment, but the process of losing him is continuous.
I don’t know which is better, but both serve as unsettling reminders of mortality; of transience and the fallibility of memory. In the absence of Nani, memory fails us when we seem to need it the most. It is like holding a fistful of sand; the harder you cling onto it, the faster it seeps out of your hands. Already there are anecdotes and idioms, recipes and songs that are seeping out of our consciousness. The Lost Bobbin is thus a desperate scramble; an attempt to retrieve, to preserve and to remember. Personally, it is me trying to make sense of something that however much I try, I can’t seem to understand; and to assimilate the scattered lives that are left behind.