Day 731

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Last night as I went to bed, like many times before I prayed for a quiet peaceful death in my sleep. Facing another day has often been a terribly treacherous prospect. A heart so shattered, wonder how it keeps me alive!

I woke up knowing today marked the same wretched point in the circle of time where we were 2 years ago – the same dark spot that has smudged the rest of my days, the same dagger that has gouged an incurable agonising hole in my being.

Finding excuses to stay in bed for a bit longer I turned my phone on. The first message was from a friend who had lit a few candles in Saagar’s memory and said she was thinking of us today. Then over the course of the day there were similar messages and phone calls from Saagar’s friends, their parents, our friends and family. I was amazed that so many people reached out to us. So many didn’t know Saagar and so many I have never met. It was truly healing and life-affirming. Yes. Together we can keep Saagar’s memory alive. And that of many other innocent young people like him. They will not be forgotten. Their life and death will not be a waste. Their stories will be told and retold till lessons that need to be learnt are learnt.

We held a traditional hindu prayer ceremony called ‘havan’ at home in the afternoon. Havan is a ritual of making offerings such as grains and ghee into a consecrated fire and invoking one or more deities. It is accompanied by chanting of Sanskrit prayers and mantras. It is said to purify the environment and allow for transformation of individuals. As I made those offerings into the fire, it made me think of the symbolism of surrendering anger, regret and guilt to the Gods so they could be transformed to love and empathy.

The day wasn’t so wretched after all.
It was a reminder of the enduring nature of love.

Thank you Saagar for being my son and for being you.
Thank you all for reaching out.

Day 717

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Sunday lunch at the start of autumn on a warm day of blue skies and a warm sun, sitting under a wise old carob tree with supported branches and multiple dried brown beans hanging from a wide umbrella of dark green leaves with friends and strangers making introductions followed by conversations, smiles and laughter, references to this and that, occupations, travels and hobbies, daughters and mothers, food and wine, so on and so forth …. as if straight out of a film set infused with a sweet subtle smell of eucalyptus.

All of it completely meaningless, empty, futile, feckless, inane and pointless. Words, words and more words! Exhausting! I had to get up and walk away with my i-pad and take pictures of something. Anything.

In 2 weeks time he will be dead. Around this time 2 years ago he was scoring max on his depression scores and he gave it in writing to his GP in the form of a PHQ-9 form but got no help. No escalation of care. No attention. No mention of ‘suicide’ to us and yet holding a firm belief that a safety plan was in place. Sent home with the suggestion, “It will get better. Give it time. Rome was not built in one day” and a piece of paper.

It was early autumn then and it is early autumn now.
I lived in what I thought was our world then.
I live in a world of my own now. It sort of overlaps with this one in places but most of this one is irrelevant to me.

Day 714

Posted by kidsaregifts20

You are not

You are not the ageing tortoise shell.
You are not the pillows of my hands
You are not the metallic taste in my mouth when I wake
(though you could be those threads running underneath my tongue).

I doubt you are the strands of hair which survive in my windowsill
(and are likely to have lost their film of neem oil)

Though you could be the windowpane itself, which allows me the view of the sky; the interesting birds.
(You are not the birds).

You are not hidden in bone, you do not bloom in the marrow.
You are (in my opinion) not the rain in November that studs my scalp.

(But you might be the heat pressing against my body in the market souk near the mosaic-mirrored shisha stall).

You are not the sacred cow, a murmur in the heart or blood-spit in the sink.
If I open my book you might well be the fly’s open wing dashed on the page.
You are not the hand of god on an incoherent foetal face.

But yes, I think you might be that moment when the clouds ripen
(just before the rain, before it hits the cloth of my dress, my cold hands).

By Mona Arshi, from her book Small Hands at the centre of which is the slow detonation of grief after her brother’s death.

Day 710

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Can someone press the ‘Refresh’ button for me please?
Hello! Anyone there?
Nope.
Just me.
I’ve got to do it myself.

Many people ready and willing to hold my hand while I do it. Many waiting patiently for it to happen.
‘Re-fresh’.
Re-invent. Re-define. Re-create. Re-invigorate.
Re-enthuse. Re-affirm. Re-generate. Re-vive. Re-vitalise.
Re-make. Re-vamp. Re-novate. Re-build.
Re-model. Re-store. Re-new. Re-instate.
Re-live. Re-smile. Re-settle.

It’s coming up to two years!
Is that a measure of anything though?
Time means nothing.
The absolute finality of death brings Time to a halt.
The suddenness of it puts emergency breaks on Time and forces it to come to a dead stop.

The question I ask myself – how much of this being ‘stuck’ is natural and how much is generated by my ‘ego’? I am sure Eckhard Tolle would ascribe a lot of it to my ‘pain-body’.

“It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative thoughts, but that you don’t want to. This is because the pain-body is living through you, pretending to be you. And to the pain-body, pain is pleasure. It eagerly devours every negative thought. In fact, the usual voice in your head has now become the voice of the pain-body. It has taken over the internal dialogue. A vicious circle becomes established between the pain-body and your thinking. Every thought feeds the pain-body and in turn the pain-body generates more thoughts. At some point, after a few hours or even a few days, it has replenished itself and returns to its dormant stage, leaving behind a depleted organism and a body that is much more susceptible to illness. If that sounds to you like a psychic parasite, you are right. That’s exactly what it is.

The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the realization that you have a pain-body. Then, more important, in your ability to stay present enough, alert enough, to notice the pain-body in yourself as a heavy influx of negative emotion when it becomes active. When it is recognized, it can no longer pretend to be you and live and renew itself through you.

It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body. When you don’t identify with it, the pain-body can no longer control your thinking and so cannot renew itself anymore by feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between it and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy. Your thinking ceases to be clouded by emotion; your present perceptions are no longer distorted by the past. The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes its vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence.”

Conscious Presence.
Awareness of the ‘self’ which is infinitely more expansive than thoughts and feelings.

Day 709

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Often I feel like I am hanging in between life and death. Neither fully alive nor fully dead. Will this plague stay within me forever or set me free one way, or another?

Andrew Sullivan, who suffered with AIDS and its accomplices writes :

“ And for a precious short time, like so many other (HIV) positive people, I also sensed that the key to living was not a concentration on fighting the mechanics of the disease (although that was essential) or fighting the mechanics of life (although that is inevitable), but an indifference to both of their imponderables. In order to survive mentally, I had to find a place within myself where plague couldn’t get me, where success or failure in such a battle was of equal consequence. This was not an easy task. It required resisting the emotional satisfaction of being cured and the emotional closure of death itself. But in that, of course, it resembled merely what we all go through every day. Living, I discovered for the second, but really the first time, is not about resolution; it is about the place where plague can’t get you.”

The grief of loosing Saagar is not the plague. It is unbearably sad but the plague is that voice in my head that screams – “You didn’t love him enough to save him. You could have done more. Love is in actions, not words. Love is not just an emotion. All this campaigning and writing is a cover-up. You will be found out. You didn’t care enough for your own child.”

That is the plague.
Living is, to find a place where the plague can’t get me.
To find a place where it can’t get me.
Cannot get me.