Sorry, Baby: A Non-Timeline of Grief

The Adjacency of Loss

I was 28 the first time I attended a funeral for someone in my family. It wasn’t the first time I experienced death though. My earliest memory of death was my high school senior, a rising cricket star, hit by a truck. As I grew older and left for college, news of friends’ passing would make its way over a text or a Facebook post. “Did you hear about Madhav?” the message would say. Then Madhav was replaced with Matthew, then Maddie. One killed in a car accident while on vacation in New Zealand; one dead of suicide, 9 months after we had dinner together in Seattle; one through a freak medical accident at the hospital where she was due to finish her residency in 4 days.

But life doesn't stop. You soldier on. Maybe solder on. Putting your broken pieces together through force of will or throwing yourself into a distraction like work or sport. I had always been taught from a young age that death was inevitable. Morbid, coming from my parents, but probably wise. Thanks, Mummy.

As much as these events affected me, I have to admit that it was always a passing sadness. These things were happening around me, but not directly to me. Barring the untimely passing of an uncle in a car accident when I was 12, I had never really seen death up close. Moving to the US for college at 18 shielded me even more. If there were deaths in the family - my grandfather passed during Finals Week of my junior year first semester - the physical distance never allowed me to grieve with The Leftovers. I had, however, seen my grandmother fade into dementia, then seen her body wither away piece by piece over a decade. The kind of slow fade that lulls you into the acceptance of life’s finitude.

But I didn’t really know loss until I met my wife, Chandan.

Direct Hit

In Sikhism, men hold the surname Singh, which means lion, while women hold the surname Kaur, which means princess. By her own admission, until November of 2019, Chandan had a princess-like life. She was working in Chandigarh, a three-hour drive from her home in Paonta Sahib, when she received a call that “something” had happened to her father. He was already in the hospital being treated for dengue, when he felt a sudden pain in his chest. The whole drive home she stewed in anxiety, nauseous at the thought of what she might find out. When she made it home she found out her father had passed of a heart attack.

Chandan's father had been a leader in the community, an anchor to his large extended family that spanned five brothers, their children and their children’s children. He’d raised his own children with all the love he could give and every comfort he could provide. Not just a physical roof over everyone’s head but an emotional roof that protected them from any storm that may come. When Chandan and I got engaged, then married, over the course of 2021, I asked my brother-in-law what losing Papa was like. He said it was like he lost his spine and he was learning to stand up again.

Rebuilding a Life

It had been just over two years since Papa’s passing when Chandan moved to the US to live with me. She’d never traveled outside of India before but I’d already been in the country for over ten years at that point. When I had asked her how she felt about moving to a new country, she sounded so enthusiastic - “it’ll be an adventure!” she said. I felt reassured.

When I had come to the US at 18, there was a clear purpose and no time to waste - do well in college, then get a job that would justify the life savings my parents had selflessly put towards my education. That was my anchor. For Chandan, it was me. I was the anchor. I was the only reason she had left 28 years of her life behind in India and moved 8000 miles away from family.

As much as she was excited about this new place, enthusiasm quickly gave way to anxiety.

“I don’t have my own money. I don’t even have a bank account.”

“The milk tastes different here. The vegetables are like cardboard.”

“I don’t even know where to go buy toothpaste.”

If I tried to console her, I’d sometimes be met with an outburst of “You don’t get it! You’re trying to fix things instead of just listen!” She wasn’t wrong, I am a fixer.

One time at Macy’s where she was trying to buy winter clothing (she moved in Jan ‘22), she asked a store rep a question. The employee responded with an answer Chandan didn’t fully understand. Her face reported a confusion which the rep misunderstood as “inability to comprehend English.” Then her volume suddenly louder now, she bent down, looked at Chandan and said, “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? Habla Ingles?” She was the Macy’s version of Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction (”English, motherfucker, do you speak it?!”) Chandan tried to respond politely then walked away from the hostility. When she shared the incident with me later, I told her the employee was being racist and she should’ve said something back. The fixer was at work again.

Chandan felt untethered and at a loss for who she was now. A “dependent” expat who was being treated with undeserving condescension instead of warmth. The adventure turning into a nightmare.

The Inheritance of Loss

Underneath the surface of trying to find her identity in a new country, there were the feelings of abandonment - guilt at leaving her mother and brother alone in a faraway home now empty without the sounds of her father. There was also the emptiness of loss itself which would show up in places I’d least expect.

Chandan started sleeping in a lot more. Her waking hours spent in front of the TV to numb the pain. Frivolous statements would turn into arguments that stretched into the night.

“Don’t send photos of us together before showing me first.”

“Chandan, both our families are so far away, these photos are the only way that they get to see our lives.”

“No, just show them to me first.”

“But you’ll just say that you don’t look okay so I shouldn’t send them, like always.”

“Yes, so you should respect that.”

“But I’m only sending it to family! And you look pretty.”

“No I don’t and what I said is final. No photos.”

What seemed like nothing was somehow always anchored in her father’s memories. Chandan didn’t like sending pictures because it required looking at her photo library. Looking through the library meant risking seeing old pictures of her father that were too painful for her to look at. She’d rather avoid the pain than relive his loss and be reminded of his absence. At the same time there was a yearning. She told me one time that she was already starting to forget his voice; if she didn't build up the courage to see his pictures, she'd eventually forget his face. If she forgot his face, what kind of daughter would she be?

It's not like she wasn't ever happy. The adventure did have its happy moments - date nights at new restaurants, a honeymoon in Peru, traveling to see family and game nights with friends. But the happy milestones were also tainted with sadness. “My father will never be able to see or hear about this moment,” she told me on our first anniversary.

Friends would ask me how Chandan was settling in. I told them that every day was better than the last! But I also expressed dissatisfaction sometimes, “why isn’t she settled already? What more can I do?”

I used her grief to stroke my ego - “I’m being as supportive as possible. I’m so patient. I do x, y and z but it’s still not enough for her!”

When I confided in a close friend, Mindy, some of the things Chandan had shared about Papa and the ways in which they’d show up in inconspicuous corners, she said, “Harjas, that’s not a lot of time. It’s only been three years since her father passed and she’s only had about a year in this country.” But my head immediately went to, “Yeah, but three years and one year are both SO MUCH time!”

I wanted to speedrun to the “good parts” - where a conversation was just a conversation and not layers of an onion that needed to be peeled. Grief in my mind was about acceptance and I kept putting it on Chandan that she just hadn’t accepted this new reality, as harsh and sad as it might be. But what did I really know about loss barring the adjacency of it all? I wasn’t “spineless” here or learning how to stand up again. I only thought I knew better.

Sorry, Baby

Through all the difficult times though, what Chandan never stopped doing was communicating openly. She brought me into her mind. She helped me understand that grief and trauma were non-linear. As much as I could sympathize, I simply could not empathize. But living through those early months and years with her taught me empathy.

Last week I watched Sorry, Baby by Eva Victor where she also plays the lead character, Agnes. “Something bad” happened to Agnes. The movie shows the Before and After of this incident. I won’t spoil what happens but the trauma of it all is one with Agnes, likely for the rest of her life. We see how she's trying to put herself back together, piece by piece.

There's a saying in the storytelling world - "You tell your stories from your scars, not your wounds." Some wounds just run deeper; they take a long time before they become a scar. When they hurt less but still remind you of the trauma your body suffered.

And that's what you see with Agnes. She's trying her best to move past what happened to her but there are things that trigger her in seemingly surprising places. There's a scene towards the end of the movie where she's having a panic attack while driving on the highway. She pulls into the parking lot of a sandwich shop and the kindly shop owner helps her calm down by breathing with her. He offers her a sandwich to comfort her and they sit together on the curb as they talk. She tells him that something bad happened to her. He asks if it happened recently. She says three years ago. He responds:

"Three years is not a lot of time. I mean, it's a very long time, don't get me wrong, but it’s also not a lot of time."

As tender and warm (and darkly funny) the movie is, that scene in particular hit me right in the feels. It felt like a big summation of my entire relationship with Chandan. Like my friend had said, three years is not a lot of time. It is a long time but still not a lot of time.

When I met Chandan for the first time, only one-and-a-half years after her father’s passing, I had a very different notion of grief and how one deals with it. What I didn't know is that loss and how someone deals with it is not something you can or should compare. Instead of imposing my timelines of normalcy on her, I should've been more patient with her. A patience I eventually built because of her. In the following years living with her, grieving with her, seeing her wound turn into a scar and her scar into fond memories of her father - pictures she was now able to look back on - was the privilege of a lifetime. That's what building a life with someone should look like.

I learned that whenever we argued, it was not about me. It was never about me. It took some time for me to understand that there’s no clock on grief and trauma. We’re all on our own timeline and that’s okay! Chandan and I have been married for a little over four years now and have known each other for almost five. Turns out we didn't need to speedrun to the good parts. They were all good parts, even the ones that seemed bad at the time.