Sonali Gupta’s book, ‘You Will Be All Right - A Guide to Navigating Grief,’ will help you understand what death does to you when a loved one dies

After the darkness comes the light 

By Shevlin Sebastian 

Psychotherapist Sonali Gupta’s book, ‘You Will Be All Right — A Guide to Navigating Grief,’ begins with a quote by Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of ‘Eat, Pray Love,’: ‘It’s an honour to be in grief. It’s an honour to feel that much, to have loved that much.’  

In the introduction, Sonali spoke about the intergenerational silence about death that exists in Indian families. And she gave an example. 

Mayuri, 43, told Sonali, ‘This is the first time in years that I am crying while thinking about my mother’s death. I was six when my mother died in an accident. No one asked me how I felt or even tried to talk to me about what I was feeling. At home, there was sadness; yet my dad made it feel like life had to go on. I was not allowed to go to the funeral.’

Sonali begins the main section by clearing up some myths. For example, the belief that we only experience grief when we lose a loved one to death. 

This was a fallacy. If you are not conceiving, you experience grief. The same is the case when a person is going through a separation or divorce, a break-up with a close friend, a miscarriage, infidelity, bankruptcy, and a loss of autonomy. 

Here’s another myth that we all believe in: we will recover from grief and get over it as time passes. 

But the author said that this is not true. ‘Unlike other emotions, which come and go, grief stays with us,’ she wrote. ‘It’s not a phase we get done with or move on from. David Kessler, an author and expert on grief, says that grief is not the flu, which we can recover from…. we learn to live with it.’   

Grief causes many feelings to arise in you. A primary emotion is fear. How will life be now that the beloved has gone away? 

Then there is anxiety. A patient Sujoy, who lost a brother, said, ‘I find myself worrying about everybody’s health. I’m constantly overthinking about my wife’s health. I’m anxious about my mum, who is fit and fine.’ 

Other feelings include anger, loneliness, isolation, emptiness, hopelessness and a longing for the loved one. But there is also relief, especially if the loved one is suffering from a long-standing illness or having mental issues like dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. 

Alisha, a 35-year-old whose mother had dementia for four years, said, “We didn’t know how she was feeling. When she died, we all felt relief as she was in too much pain and there was nothing more we could have done. I love her and still think of her and miss her.” 

Sonali wrote, ‘It is important to remember that relief and deep sorrow can co-exist.’ 

In most societies, there are rituals which help people to cope with death. 

Mary Frances O’Connor, author of ‘The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Love and Learn from Loss’, states that mourning rituals can offer constancy and comfort when everything can feel uncertain. ‘By connecting us to rituals that have existed for hundreds of years, we are reminded that those who came before us have experienced grief and uncertainty and they have carried on and restored meaningful lives.’  

The book also delineates the physical reaction to grief. These include aches and pains, nausea, headaches, loss of libido, lack of appetite, weight gain or loss, insomnia or sleeping too much. There is also a psychosomatic reaction. A person has headaches, constipation, chest, back, body, or joint pains, breathing difficulties, or feeling feverish.           

But what is a fact is that you will never recover from the death of a loved one. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler Ross, a Swiss American psychiatrist who wrote the bestselling book, ‘On Death and Dying’, said, ‘You will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.’ 

Elisabeth spoke about the five stages of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 

There is another type of grief that everybody experiences, but nobody talks about it. This is called anticipatory grief. We imagine what will happen to us when a loved one, or a parent, dies even though the people are healthy at the moment. 

It brings guilt to the people who experience it, so they keep quiet about it. But people experience this all the time. And there is nothing to be ashamed about. It comes about from a fear that there is limited time. And one day, inevitably, death will come calling. 

Then there is disenfranchised grief. This is the grief that one experiences when a maid, watchman, a former teacher, or a pet dies. And the people around them cannot understand why their wife, father or friend is having this intense reaction to the death of an acquaintance. 

It is a grief that is not publicly mourned or socially accepted. This grief can be socially isolating. Sonali went through something similar when a former client died. She did not know how to process the grief. A supervisor told her, “It’s okay if you haven't met the person for years, the bond remains. Allow yourself to grieve. Find a way to express what you are feeling.” So Sonali took to writing a journal and felt better after a few days. 

Members of the LGBTQ community, who have not come out, have to suffer grief in private and in isolation when a partner dies. This also happens when you lose a pet. Except for pet lovers, the rest of society does not understand your grief. “Why feel sad? It’s just a dog. You can get another pet,” is the common refrain. 

Other events which cause disenfranchised grief include celebrity deaths. When Hollywood star Robin Williams died of suicide, Sonali started crying. ‘He was my favourite actor, and I associated some of my fondest memories with his movies,’ she wrote.    

Then people may experience delayed grief. This happens when a person dies by suicide, or drug or alcohol overdose. The spouse may be in shock for months. He or she cannot talk openly about what has happened. They may go through panic, anxiety, or fear attacks. It is only after a long period that they permit themselves to grieve about what has happened. 

In the last section, the author wrote movingly about the culture of silence that surrounds people when a close relative has died. Once, Ravi, a 50-year-old whose wife died of cancer, entered his office canteen. He saw that all his teammates who were laughing suddenly became silent. 

“I don’t know if they felt uncomfortable being happy around me because of what happened, or they felt pity for me,” he said. “But I had reached a place where I wanted to leave the organisation, as I was tired of these silences.” 

Author Katherine May succinctly describes this feeling in her book, ‘Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times’: ‘Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you are cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from humiliation or failure.’ But all of us have to struggle through the darkness till we see the light again.  

This is a book everyone should read, especially if you have encountered the death of a near one. You will understand with clarity the tumultuous emotions you are going through. And if you see somebody who is struggling to cope because of the death of a close relative, this is a good book to present to them. It will make them less lonely and realise what they are going through is what humanity has gone through for millennia and will continue to do so. 

Whether we like it or not, accept it or not, death is an inescapable fact of life. We are born, we live, then we die. This happens to everybody and to all the people we love. There is no escape from this finality. But books like this are a soothing balm to apply to our pain and provide us with the motivation to live life again. 

Or to paraphrase Sonali: ‘We have to learn to carry love and loss together.’

Published in kitaab.org