I was attending a funeral of a distant relative recently. I had never seen him in person or in photographs. Just knew that he was 45 and died of sudden heart attack and has left behind his wife and two children as family.
I must admit I was a child when I attended my grandmother’s funeral and then didn’t have much idea what it is all about and fortunately never attended anyone else’s funeral till date. And so only was in a very difficult state of mind when I went to attend this funeral of someone whom I didn’t even know.
There were people, lots of them , all dressed in black who had come to pay their last respects. After the church service, when the body was taken to the cemetery for burial, it all started…. There was a lot of crying and screaming and a wanting not to let go…His brother collapsed and so did his wife…I didn’t see any of it coz I was at the back of the crowd…. Just heard it… and it somehow made me emotional too… When everyone had paid their respects, his wife was brought to do the same… with a body so weak, a mind even weaker, she stood there…im sure she had all those memories about him flashing by, yet had to bid him goodbye and this time forever… the grief in her eyes, the pain in her heart was so evident… and then came the children… they stood there, looking at their dad for the last time, thinking of how he nurtured them and made them who they are today… and then the daughter just blew a flying kiss with shivering hands into where his body laid still… and a tear dropped from my eyes….
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. It is to muster up the courage to live without our beloved ones. Death can only end a life, not a relationship. Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries, it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away the memories either. In the end, life becomes stronger than death. We learn to live without them being a part of our daily lives, we tend to achieve more than what we thought we could never do on our own- but its coz we still love them and their love gives us the strength.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Tears revisited...
Pain inspires the writer in me. That makes me a little sad because I don't want to let go of it either. There are days that I wish I felt as comfortable as I once did in expressing myself here in my blogs. If others read here, they know way more about me and my weird hiccups in life than I know about theirs. It feels unsafe sometimes. It makes it sound like I dwell in grief, but this is the place I process and repair that part of my life. And so it is important, I pen it down….
I have images that sometimes pop in my head that take me back to that dreadful day. A day filled with so many dark and haunting thoughts that I sit alone with. Sometimes I wish I could paint them, maybe they'd leave me alone.
A few months back, I was just basking in the glory of being pregnant, with all that extra love and attention, enlightening and reminding myself every moment that there is a new life growing within me…when a miscarriage followed and I was left with merely a pool of blood as the only memory of my unborn child…
Over the months, I've become very good at compartmentalizing the grief. It no longer swallows me up for hours or days at a time. It comes in moments like when I hear a song in the car, I completely lose it for 5 minutes then I pull it together and walk in to meet friends with a smile on my face. And that smile is genuine, not forced. Seems strange that I can just wrap it up like that now.
I also feel less self-conscious. I remember in those first days, I felt like everyone knew there was something wrong with me, like I was the only woman in the world who failed in the worst way. And if they didn't know part of me didn't want them to find out because I can't stand pity. I just wanted to be 'normal' again. Another part of me was desperate to tell them why I was so effed up.
I'm so different now. It's hard to find words. The pain has subsided and I've physically healed. As an outcome of this dreadful event, I've learned to love better coz there is a silent guilt, which tells me that my baby left me coz I didn’t love it enough….
I've been up to my neck in the everyday life now. Sometimes it's the keeping busy that keeps the grief at bay. It’s a constant struggle to fill the emptiness of the void, the endless pain of losing my child. I've lain awake many nights. But it's in the silence of the night that I find answers to what’s really in my heart …To look at myself and see something more than my empty womb staring back …To search for a reassurance that I wont be disowned again … To search fanatically for hours together to find the brightest shining star in the sky and believe that there is still a trace and my baby isn’t lost forever…
When I lost my baby, I didn’t know who to turn to and who to talk to. There wasn’t anything out there that I could relate to.
We forget to count the blessings at the moment and to enjoy it. But life is so unpredictable that any moment lost, is lost forever.
So cherish your moments and count your blessings when they last…. we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of the treasures we hold.
I have images that sometimes pop in my head that take me back to that dreadful day. A day filled with so many dark and haunting thoughts that I sit alone with. Sometimes I wish I could paint them, maybe they'd leave me alone.
A few months back, I was just basking in the glory of being pregnant, with all that extra love and attention, enlightening and reminding myself every moment that there is a new life growing within me…when a miscarriage followed and I was left with merely a pool of blood as the only memory of my unborn child…
Over the months, I've become very good at compartmentalizing the grief. It no longer swallows me up for hours or days at a time. It comes in moments like when I hear a song in the car, I completely lose it for 5 minutes then I pull it together and walk in to meet friends with a smile on my face. And that smile is genuine, not forced. Seems strange that I can just wrap it up like that now.
I also feel less self-conscious. I remember in those first days, I felt like everyone knew there was something wrong with me, like I was the only woman in the world who failed in the worst way. And if they didn't know part of me didn't want them to find out because I can't stand pity. I just wanted to be 'normal' again. Another part of me was desperate to tell them why I was so effed up.
I'm so different now. It's hard to find words. The pain has subsided and I've physically healed. As an outcome of this dreadful event, I've learned to love better coz there is a silent guilt, which tells me that my baby left me coz I didn’t love it enough….
I've been up to my neck in the everyday life now. Sometimes it's the keeping busy that keeps the grief at bay. It’s a constant struggle to fill the emptiness of the void, the endless pain of losing my child. I've lain awake many nights. But it's in the silence of the night that I find answers to what’s really in my heart …To look at myself and see something more than my empty womb staring back …To search for a reassurance that I wont be disowned again … To search fanatically for hours together to find the brightest shining star in the sky and believe that there is still a trace and my baby isn’t lost forever…
When I lost my baby, I didn’t know who to turn to and who to talk to. There wasn’t anything out there that I could relate to.
We forget to count the blessings at the moment and to enjoy it. But life is so unpredictable that any moment lost, is lost forever.
So cherish your moments and count your blessings when they last…. we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of the treasures we hold.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Love crushed in the tiffs of Real world vs fantasy world
A friend of mine recently said that its quite different to love somebody and to be in love with somebody…. Got me thinking…. They are such simple words yet has so much depth to it….
It is quite often now we see that people who are married have strong feelings for others in their life. Before you blame them, put a thought across why should have that happened in the first place… If they were completely satisfied in their first relation, they would not have ever been in search for another…and we know no relation is perfect, but if the couple were happy together then there was never a place for the third person. They would have never felt the chill on their spine and goosebumps on the arms and butterflies in the stomach when they met this new person and their eyes locked for the first time or when they shook hands for the first time, if everything was simply imperfectly perfect in their marriage life.. Definitely you care and love your life partner but you are not in love with him/her.
What if you are out of a relationship for which you gave it your all, your blood and your soul, but for whatever reason it may have been, had to get out of it… you thought of this person as your soulmate, your friend and your advisor, your first thought as the first rays of the sun awake you and the last memory on your mind as you drift off to sleep … you might not be around him/her but the very thought of him/her make you blush, gives you a chill, and makes you feel all the fight is worthwhile….Now, here you are in love with a person….
And when you did get out of this blissful relationship, just imagine how long would it take for you to even start loving another person, forget about falling in love with him/her.
Bite the reality..swallow the bitterness -but its true…
The real world might be harsh and rude and one searches for their fantasy world where everything is rosy. What makes the fantasy world so beautiful is the sheer fact that the real world is so cruel and harsh and so only when one falls back from the fantasy world, they feel even worse coz now they know the taste of honey which lies within the beehive of thousands of stinging honeybees.
Fantasy is a place to escape when you no longer want to live in real life -where you can let your imagination run free and have control over what you see and hear. That’s where you fall in love with someone.
There comes a point in your life, when you are tired of chasing and trying to fix things… its not giving up- its realizing that you don’t need some things, and that extra drama they bring along. As long as I have been breathing, people have been deceiving… Been through the breakups, backstabs and lies….
I do think we try to create in our little fantasy world what we desire in our real world relationships and tend to get lost. This is not when we become really desperate, but just by searching for some place to fulfill desires . And when people are desperate we are able to believe in what we need to believe in rather than what actually is. Many wonderful memories and certain closeness a bond that can bring and will never end..
The need to be loved makes us use our fantasy thinking. Who has not imagined finding a desperately needed love or exaggerated its sincerity or completeness? We can experience good things for a time but' hopefully have the sense to pull out and remain friends .We experience so much disappointment later in life when our hopes are dashed by reality. It seems we need to control our imagining so it does not set us up for more unrealistic expectations and suffer even more. I feel we can have resilience to endure and push forward not to risk it again.
We look for others that have the same feelings and desires, and use our ability to create a unique world. We see ourselves and project it outside, giving it reality in the heart of our creation, to hide from reality and imagine an inner place the ability to dream of a better world. Creativity is a human gift you spend your life trying to create a part of the world that gives you comfort.
Love is when you shed a tear and still want him, it's when he ignores you and you still love him, it's when he loves another girl but you still smile and say I'm happy for you, when all you really do is cry.
There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
Simple facts – It is good to live in an illusionary world but know when is the right time to buckle up the seat belt on a flight back to reality… none of us want to get hurt in emergency landings..…
Never force yourself or someone else to fall in love ..Force never creates love, only creates distance….
So if you got my love, don’t abuse it and if you have my trust, don’t ever lose it.
It is quite often now we see that people who are married have strong feelings for others in their life. Before you blame them, put a thought across why should have that happened in the first place… If they were completely satisfied in their first relation, they would not have ever been in search for another…and we know no relation is perfect, but if the couple were happy together then there was never a place for the third person. They would have never felt the chill on their spine and goosebumps on the arms and butterflies in the stomach when they met this new person and their eyes locked for the first time or when they shook hands for the first time, if everything was simply imperfectly perfect in their marriage life.. Definitely you care and love your life partner but you are not in love with him/her.
What if you are out of a relationship for which you gave it your all, your blood and your soul, but for whatever reason it may have been, had to get out of it… you thought of this person as your soulmate, your friend and your advisor, your first thought as the first rays of the sun awake you and the last memory on your mind as you drift off to sleep … you might not be around him/her but the very thought of him/her make you blush, gives you a chill, and makes you feel all the fight is worthwhile….Now, here you are in love with a person….
And when you did get out of this blissful relationship, just imagine how long would it take for you to even start loving another person, forget about falling in love with him/her.
Bite the reality..swallow the bitterness -but its true…
The real world might be harsh and rude and one searches for their fantasy world where everything is rosy. What makes the fantasy world so beautiful is the sheer fact that the real world is so cruel and harsh and so only when one falls back from the fantasy world, they feel even worse coz now they know the taste of honey which lies within the beehive of thousands of stinging honeybees.
Fantasy is a place to escape when you no longer want to live in real life -where you can let your imagination run free and have control over what you see and hear. That’s where you fall in love with someone.
There comes a point in your life, when you are tired of chasing and trying to fix things… its not giving up- its realizing that you don’t need some things, and that extra drama they bring along. As long as I have been breathing, people have been deceiving… Been through the breakups, backstabs and lies….
I do think we try to create in our little fantasy world what we desire in our real world relationships and tend to get lost. This is not when we become really desperate, but just by searching for some place to fulfill desires . And when people are desperate we are able to believe in what we need to believe in rather than what actually is. Many wonderful memories and certain closeness a bond that can bring and will never end..
The need to be loved makes us use our fantasy thinking. Who has not imagined finding a desperately needed love or exaggerated its sincerity or completeness? We can experience good things for a time but' hopefully have the sense to pull out and remain friends .We experience so much disappointment later in life when our hopes are dashed by reality. It seems we need to control our imagining so it does not set us up for more unrealistic expectations and suffer even more. I feel we can have resilience to endure and push forward not to risk it again.
We look for others that have the same feelings and desires, and use our ability to create a unique world. We see ourselves and project it outside, giving it reality in the heart of our creation, to hide from reality and imagine an inner place the ability to dream of a better world. Creativity is a human gift you spend your life trying to create a part of the world that gives you comfort.
Love is when you shed a tear and still want him, it's when he ignores you and you still love him, it's when he loves another girl but you still smile and say I'm happy for you, when all you really do is cry.
There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.
When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
Simple facts – It is good to live in an illusionary world but know when is the right time to buckle up the seat belt on a flight back to reality… none of us want to get hurt in emergency landings..…
Never force yourself or someone else to fall in love ..Force never creates love, only creates distance….
So if you got my love, don’t abuse it and if you have my trust, don’t ever lose it.
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