The Language of Grief

Different causes of death lead to different forms of grieving.

Rachana Ramesh

Death is the mightiest mystery of life. Its inevitability has been a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement all at once. Humans, being the only species consciously aware of the inescapability of death, have sought from time immemorial to cope with the emotion of grief. The pandemic has collectively put us all in a universal room of loss and grief. If you luckily didn’t lose a loved one to the pandemic, it’s most likely that you heard of a loved one losing a loved one. There is nowhere to hide and all of us are looking at each other to find an elusive language to express the ache that is resting in our chest. We need the comfort of words to breathe.

The session language of grief at the Bengaluru Literature Festival was an attempt to understand and articulate the plight of the bereaved. Dipti Nair, a journalist by profession, who moderated the session started with a mention of the poem ‘Grief is a Mouse’ by Emily Dickinson. It explores a range of metaphors, including the idea of grief as a mouse, which ‘chooses wainscot in the breast for his shy house’. Dipti hoped to set the mood with the idea that grief is deeply felt, but hidden away: like a mouse in the wainscot, we are aware of it continually, but seldom see it.

Stutee Ghosh, an RJ, lost her father to the second wave of pandemic. Says she: “There was this very urgent need to get back on track. I had to get back to work while I processed all this grief and it was also the time when the second wave was at its peak and you couldn’t meet people or go out.” Stutee’s grieving process led to the emergence of ‘Mera Wala grief ’-- a podcast for anybody dealing with loss. “The only way I could have any sense of normalcy was if I drowned myself in work. But my work is primarily a morning show and it is supposed to be happy, chirpy – the city wakes up with me. I didn’t have it in me for the first time and I wanted to speak about this feeling that was tearing me on the inside.”

“This is not something I had done before. In the media, people talk about views, reach and what people like. I didn’t know what to expect but the response was phenomenal. It’s not just me. Anybody grieving person wants the heart shared stories to make them feel heard”, she adds. While illness is a socially acceptable form of death, suicide falls on the other extreme. When the death has an associated stigma, the griever will experience additional layers of pain through their journey. “Until it happened to me, it was something that happened to other families,” says Nandini Murali, an author among many other things, about suicide. “Grief is more about loss than death because there are other kinds of grief due to non-death causes as well. To me, grief is a complex medley of emotions and feelings. It is the search for a limb that was once there and now it’s become phantom”, she continues.

After Nandini lost her husband to suicide, the first thought that rose in her mind was: “What will I tell my friends, family and colleagues?” She wanted to whitewash it, to erase it and to invent socially acceptable forms of death for her husband: that he died in sleep or of a longtime ailing. Suicide is a stigmatised form of death. One of many others like substance abuse-related deaths, homicides or deaths due to abortions. The list is long. The grieving process when it comes to stigmatised deaths entirely shifts from having people around to provide empathy and support, to them turning away their eyes with judgement.

While grief is an emotion an individual goes through, it is also very collective. For example, mourning rituals are a compulsion after a death irrespective of culture, religion or value system. They are built and structured to help the bereaved to come to terms with continuing their life with an absent loved one. For a minimum of 13 days, families come together with rituals involving flowers, food and the memories of the deceased. It is also customary for family and friends to visit the home of the bereaved to offer their sympathy.

“So much of stigma, so much of shame, so much secrecy and so much silence”, says Nandini about grieving a suicide loss. The process of grieving a stigmatised death is alienating, she continued, adding that the amount of isolation and shame is immense. “Grieving is the process. It takes time and does not happen overnight. Most people tend to think that grieving happens in the mind but I think it also happens in the body, located at multiple locations”, Nandini noted the difference between grief as an emotion and grieving as the process. Nandini’s way of grieving was doing what she does best -- write and th