…”I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
“The different plague of each calamity”
— Constance in King John, Act III, Scene 4
My paternal grandmother passed away last year, on the first of July. My father’s mother, my last grandparent. She took to her grave whatever little energy I had to make it through the rest of 2024. The last time I saw her was two years before, when we said goodbye, before I came to Korea. We took a picture together, which I liked so much at the time, and which I dislike a bit now, because the lighting was not very flattering. But I was hugging her, and it’s one of our sweetest photos. As we drove away, I took a video of her outside the house, making finger hearts and waving goodbye.
I had a call with dad on the weekend after her passing. He told me about the three weeks that she spent under intensive care. It was a Monday night when my aunt called him, and he went running to their house, because grandma had passed out. He had done that several times; she would often run out of breath in the middle of the night, sometimes due to asthma, sometimes due to anxiety. But, this time, it was different, that time. Dad said he knew she wouldn’t recover the moment he got there, and saw her lying on the floor, almost lifeless, as the emergency workers tried to bring her back.
The last time they met was on Sunday, the day before. After my sister and I moved out, visiting grandma helped my parents fill their weekends. He went alone that time; she was in the kitchen, as usual, cooking something delicious (as usual). They talked about a bunch of small things, he nibbled on whatever she was preparing. She was running out of supplements, so he told her he would make sure to buy a new box later that week. On the way home, he passed by a drugstore, and decided to stop and get the supplements, because he wanted her to know that he meant it, when he said he would buy them; he wanted her to know that he really cared. Unbeknownst to all, that was their farewell: a small thoughtful gesture.
Grandma and I texted almost every day. Our last interaction was also on Sunday, the day before she stopped breathing in the middle of the night. It was midnight in Korea, around noon in Brazil. I was exhausted from the week and went to bed at 8, woke up around 11.45, and decided to go for a walk. My head was full of things that I needed to sort out. I wanted to speak with someone, but he was already asleep. I texted another friend, then I replied to my grandma’s “good morning” message. She couldn’t text well so she mostly sent voice notes, and a swarm of stickers, and I always replied back in the same fashion. That night, I only sent one, because I was too distressed. I ended up walking to meet my friend, cried a lot about what was bothering me, and she had to stay over, because I couldn’t stop crying.
Many alternative scenarios run through my mind, as I think about that night. I wonder what could have been different. Maybe grandma and I would have talked more, if I hadn’t been so distracted by the conversation I wanted to have with someone. But maybe I wouldn’t have even replied to her text until it was too late, if I hadn’t decided to leave for a walk. What if he had been up, what if my friend had been asleep. If I wasn’t so tired, from having multiple friends visiting that week. If I hadn’t gone to Austria, where I met those friends. If I hadn’t dated the guy who told me about that project in Austria. If I had stayed home that Thursday night in 2023. If I had passed that scholarship interview in 2022, and gone to a different Master’s program, instead of the one to which I applied the month after. If I hadn’t removed my wisdom tooth right before the interview that I failed. If I hadn’t decided to give this idea of going to graduate school in Korea a shot.
I am an overthinker and I cannot afford to have many regrets. The solution is to always do everything that I feel like I should do, living to the fullest of my heart and conscience at any given time. I trust my ability to put all of my money where my mouth is; some might say that not everything we do requires 100% of us, but I disagree. I am hyperaware of how the small things that happen, the small choices that we make, become the pipes and prisms of much bigger processes and events. Be it the vice of writers, the obsession with connecting parts and chains of events, or my flawed sociological imagination, lost in the predicting of outcomes. In both cases, I am always trying to make sense of the narrative. And this is a dangerous habit, the source of multiple cognitive biases, the reason I can’t afford to go without therapy, but it is also the reason I know that I meant that little sticker I sent to my grandma, with all my heart. I always do.
There is a text that has been occupying my thoughts for months now. I haven’t written it yet, but I have been trying to, for a while. It is loosely about how I feel about life. This is pathetically broad and the reason why it remains unwritten. It feels daunting because it is something I want to write solely to justify myself before the world. I can never get the content right because, at different times, I feel differently about what parts of myself are the most disjointed, most unjustifiable and unacceptable (by me, first, then by others). At the same time, I suspect there is some loose connecting thread linking all of these struggles, hence why I still think about it as One Text that I shall write, one day. Soon, hopefully.
I consider myself lucky whenever I am reminded that living is as much of a beautiful privilege as it is a heavy burden, and that our lack of control over things is the norm, not the exception. It doesn’t always hit as heavily as it does when someone dies, but there are other smaller deaths along the way. My obsession with narratives is challenged by all the ways that life turns out to be anti-climactic. Seeing talented young people die in preventable accidents, seeing elders who aged into poverty and loneliness after a lifetime of love, service and hard work. So many efforts that went unrewarded, unacknowledged, so much love that might as well have gone to waste. There is no way to account for all of the loose ends in the tapestry of living. Maybe that is why I have never hated stories as much as I do now; no amount of perspective, reframing or starting over can account for where I stand.
But I prayed for such a life. A few years ago, when I dedicated my youth to the service of God, I asked Him to freely take me or leave me wherever He pleased, however suited His plans. This meant that my own plans were second to whatever He needed me to do first. It was an open invitation to delays, detours and other inconveniences in the sequence of events I had envisioned for myself. The prayer sounds great when you tell people about it, something to boast about—how selflessly you have given yourself away to the Kingdom of God! It is not so good when events begin to unfold, and you realise you are not fit for the measure of faith you are expected to deploy, to endure season after season stuck where you hadn’t hoped to be. My hopes are desires aren’t geared towards eternity, not as much as I thought they were.
Not all days feel like a failure, though. I am convinced I feel it more often than most, that things were exactly as they were supposed to be—not as a way to rationalise the hurt of not getting what I wanted, but really experiencing that small window of serendipity in which the specific twists and turns that made something possible are so intricate, that it couldn’t be anything other than divine. This can be as little as having a heartfelt conversation with a friend, and realising that moment wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t unemployed (as I am now). In the terms of machine intelligence, this is a small victory of all the reprogramming effort I have taken up. Optimism doesn’t come naturally to me, so I had to build the frame myself. But it is a struggle, and a habit, and I feel less than perseverant these days.
The spiral of regret that followed after my grandmother’s death stemmed from the feeling that I had been counted as unworthy of a proper goodbye, because I was too distracted with unimportant things. On her last day on earth, when she reached out to wish me a good Sunday, my mind was filled with regret from something else, something avoidable, a stupid hurt that I had brought upon myself. Like I was being punished for fixating on my broken heart, something which hardly anyone else thought worthy of so much thinking. This is a downside of certain religious ways of seeing the world—immediately assigning things as blessings or curses, and then just bending the narrative as events unfold, and new consequences come about. Every single thing that went wrong, or not as I expected, in the last two years or so, has felt like a penitence.
Overthinking feeds off cognitive dissonances, sustaining the belief that any turmoil—present, past or future—can be addressed with the right thinking process. Guilt keeps the gears spinning; a misplaced sense of responsibility goes a long way in convincing someone they occupy an extremely powerful and important position, in the grand scheme of related facts and events in a chain reaction. But what did I expect to feel, after the death of a loved one? Blaming myself is one of the natural reactions; madness goes with sorrow where reasons fail to follow.
There is an ideal version of me that is unmoved by circumstances, a machine who never fails to predict what is the best, most optimal micro-decision to be made at all times. I will never measure up because I am a poet, and I was born to play the fool. I miscalculate the costs, pay the full price, reap both the bitter and the sweet fruit. I bear the burden of existing, which is doing things and leaving traces. Maybe there is a deeper, higher aspiration, lurking beneath the things I say when I resent being alive the most, which is to have never existed at all. No body, no sins, no pleasure, no rewards, and no burdens. The ultimate control measure.
Funnily enough, on the other side of all the what-ifs that I can pull out of the pain of grandma’s passing, there a little counter-fact. I was supposed to be going back to Brazil around that time, maybe in late August or mid-September, but I had to delay my graduation—because of the semester I spent going to Austria, because of the chain of events that led to my broken heart. If I hadn’t, she would have passed right before we were scheduled to reunite. I have enough logical thinking and honesty left in me to agree that this would have been somehow worse, all things considered. Assigning a label of blessing or curse to these events is not the point I am trying to make, but this small thought, amidst the sea of possible pathways in my head, did help me sleep at night. A functioning reminder of how little perspective I am capable of conjuring. Peace is not a natural response; it is giving up, and it begets something to be given up, first.
This has been a season of losses, smaller ones, but coming for the same pressure points nonetheless—guilt, regret, resentment. Days when the joy of the small pleasures doesn’t linger. I am coming to terms with my humanity again, in different ways. It’s been nine months since grandma’s passing. I made peace with the goodbye I couldn’t say. Reason is invariably post facto; my mind has cleared a bit, and things turn out to be very simple, as they are. Grandma’s time came, and now she is gone, and this has nothing to do with me and what I think I can control. And I miss her terribly, and I will do so for a long time. It will eventually hurt less, but other things will come and hurt me just the same or worse. Then I will die one day as well. Regardless of the narratives I have told myself about living, there is no different end to the story. Rest in peace, grandma. I am coming to meet you, too.
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
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