Life after loss

Hope is not always a happy instrument for survival. At times it worsens our pain and adds to the panic, forcing one to delay the inevitable tryst with reality. KS Narendran, 51, didn’t want that. He decided to face reality head-on, like a fallible, understanding human being. “From the early weeks, the possibility that my wife is not going to come back has been dangling precariously,” he says.

His wife of over 25 years, Chandrika Sharma, was on board the Malaysian Airlines MH370 that mysteriously went off the radar on March 8, 2014, on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. Sharma was heading to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to attend a Food and Agriculture Organisation conference. “When the news came in, I thought it would probably be a matter of few hours before the confusion and the dust settles and we had some facts,” says Narendran. And he is still waiting. He didn’t imagine it to be the long-drawn, unending wait it has become.

But he was not ready to let his loss overpower his ways. Yet it wasn’t easy to cope with the deep void that’s come up in his life. “Intellectually one understands that nobody is here for eternity. Mortality is a given,” reasons Narendran, sitting in his neat, capacious flat in Guindy, Chennai. “In most cases, you don’t really set an end date and often it visits you without your knowing.” Sharma and Narendran had often talked about what lay in store. “We would say who’s gonna be here tomorrow. The fact that we might not be living as long as we might wish was almost certain.”

But that doesn’t take away the difficulty in dealing with the loss. “So, the intellectual understanding, at least for me, made it more difficult to deal with emotional acceptance.” While it helped him be functional at least in the early months, it made it tougher to actually accept and acknowledge what he was feeling. “The fact of feeling alone, the fact of missing my wife, the fact of feeling lonely. Yes, it did make things a lot more difficult,” says Narendran who is not overtly religious.

How did he manage to move on? Or has he? “One of the things I started doing was to write.” It helped to put down what he felt. “It helped me come to terms with what was happening within me and outside. In the privacy of my own conversations with the medium, such introspection was much easier.” Also, there were a lot of thoughts buzzing around which were difficult to sift through. “Writing helped me piece things together and see things from a distance.”

Then there were friends. Many would drop in. “They would invite me to come by and spend time with them, not necessarily to ‘moan, groan, bemoan. Just to experience companionship.’ That was quite helpful.”

Also, a number of people wrote in. There were several Facebook messages, e-mails, SMSes, and even snail mails (cards and letters). “I’d reply to as many of them as I could.” He realised there were many who don’t necessarily deal with their sense of loss “clearly, fully or comprehensively”. “Nobody does,” he says. It is not as if it is over and done with. “Nobody has ever completely worked through it and has come out of it. So, there are remnants, there are residues, there are things that get evoked each time somebody around them has encountered some loss.”

Those who wrote in spoke of their own loss and “I realised that in a way this process of communicating was both valuable to me and others. That makes me even more responsible, that one must reply or respond to those people and let them know what’s happening.” And many of them knew Sharma. They wrote about their association with her. Narendran discovered that her world was large and that she has made a difference to lot of people, many unknown to him. “Through them I discovered facets, which over 25 years of our companionship, had not really revealed as vividly, as brightly as these conversations portrayed.”

Did that cure it all? One doesn’t know. “Some part of my day ends up with a requirement to respond to my responsibilities. And I realise that once one has got back a semblance of routine, it makes life a little easier and the task of coping not a lonely burden.” But there are still large tracts of the day where he continues to wander, ask what might have happened, and feels “a little loss in myself”. But “life goes on”.

Their daughter is a student of psychology in Delhi. “I only hope she has come to terms with her loss. I can only wish. I won’t know for certain.” But he believes youngsters have a different way of dealing with things, like giving themselves a long time to come to terms with loss. “There is no immediacy.” The immediacy is for other things — a career or other ambitions. Narendran lost his father when he was 17 and “it took me over a decade to grieve and really understand and come to terms with the loss. So all that I do is let my daughter know that no questions are off limits, no questions taboo, no conversation unwelcome.”

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