Does Grief Give Permission To Hurt?

When we experience deep missing for someone who is never going to return, we are barely able to function. Take this firsthand from a mother whose child, barely 3 years old, suddenly dies, with no prevailing illness or any sign of a serious warning. Not that it is any different for parents when a child dies due to a serious or chronic illness. What parents, who live beyond their children, experience is far beyond any loss a human brain is capable of processing, let alone making sense of. When this sort of missing plays out every day, it lands nothing but torment, so deep that its visibility becomes overtly subjective to the outside world.

I have been living for days, 532 days precisely, without my little Aabi. 'Have been living' is an expression understandable to the world, because the days are difficult in a way only we know. Not difficult in the way it gets difficult when the weather plays out disastrously on a day planned for a big event, or when we spill all the milk, or when we fracture a leg or hand while playing. But profound exhaustion that seeps into every aspect of life. Difficult, like when breathing hurts, and when you wake up tired because you absolutely despise the routine ahead, or even when the longing to tend to your child remains hanging loose at one end with no foreseeable end to this ache. What I carry all day are emotions that I do not get to release, because it would be highly inappropriate for the people around me to witness them or manage me or know what to do in the case.

I know parents who have come to offer space and support to us as a grieving family themselves, living through the years without their child, and I often see and feel an immediate connection. Strangers from all over the world connect even more than family ever did, under this umbrella of having to live beyond our children. Yet, nobody ever really physically expresses the exact emotions we all carry deep within. I often wonder why we choose to be alone to let it all out. The choked and pent-up feelings burst out only in isolation.

Some thoughts are often shared through various platforms, digitally, through writing, videos, songs, memories, or by supporting causes and communities that resonate. But what plays inside us is unique to a level that never surfaces.

For me, I play it a bit too well at work. Everyone around me knows what I endure, yet they find a cooperative colleague every day, joining them for meetings, team catch-ups, after-work unwinding, or even a proactive helper at times. What if I am what I feel all the time? I know for sure I will be highly unsocial, unacceptable, and deemed unfit to work. No doubt! But does this behaviour ever raise a question around my well-being? Never did. Never will. As long as people can get a 'normal' version of you, your losses become only a chapter of your story.

What does this do to me, as a human being in pain? I am unable to perform for too long and break down in front of people I know subconsciously can not stop being mine. It surfaces as anger, frustration, tiredness, a never-ending irritated mood, a short-tempered attitude all the time, and zero tolerance for any normalcy or acceptance of regular happy family days. Everything lands as drama. The anguish over the unfairness of life towards my child reaches unfiltered to those whom I always perceive as my constants. Those whom my brain and heart are wired to recognise as safe to be 'myself' with. It hurts too. Giving it all to them, hurts as well. Is this taking them for granted?

When they cry, not just for our Aabi not being able to see life more, grow up, be her beautiful self with a lot more time in this world, but also for the hurt and pain that I carry, that I express so brutally, I feel even more helpless. I feel their helplessness as well, because I understand helplessness now. I understand the meaning of a parent being helpless, being defeated by circumstances, and being hurt by the pain of missing. Despite all the help in this world, most medical methods focus on bottling up or dimming the surge of these feelings. Is it the way? Right or wrong?

Grief counsellors help, but can we wail and cry and scream in all of our grief sessions? Can we crave for what we can never get, again and again? Can we keep revising the last moments endlessly to actually try (failing every time) to convince our brain that our little child stopped breathing life one sickening moment in this world, at a certain horrible hour and minute of the clock on a certain day and date? Can we show our brokenness and the physical presentation of the pain every time? Even the experts and those with lived experiences struggle beyond a limit. Bare, ungated grief is unbearable.

It would take anyone a fraction of a second to label it as a disorder.

Does this grief and pain permit us to be hurtful to those who love us unconditionally, by letting our raw, vulnerable selves out and open for them or with them?

I gently and respectfully ask all who experience this never-ending soreness of child loss to share their thoughts and their lived experiences around allowing the grief's rawness to unfold. Who is the right audience for it? If we all have the same question, then we share another common ground here, painfully, but real and in love. In love, for who knows where it flows without the ones for whom it exists. An unknown territory. The uncertainty is another killer.

I feel those who can't mask it. It takes a lot and a lot of work every second of every day to weave that mask, and it is never appreciated enough. It is woven for the safety of a world that doesn't know this pain. For the safety and love of the ones we honor and carry only in memories now. For the safety and comfort of the ones in our homes. It is woven, because without it this world would burn with anger, fear, rage, heartbreak, brokenness.

Our isolation and distance from the normal world beyond unavoidable situations is unknowingly a safety act. Please appreciate the fact that we try our best to carry it deep within. As personal as it may sound, it is enough to set the world on fire.

Grief experts have described grief as tiredness, as body aches, as anxiety, as lack of confidence, and a lot more. The question: is it all grief, or is it the pressure of weaving and wearing the mask every day that this world needs to function?

I want to miss my Aabi out loud, so loud that the world knows her. It would have been a private life if she were alive, with a few knowing us, and a lifespan of little enclosed adventures that would have been known only to us and the people we know. I am only able to write and publish about her, the energy she carried and continues to pump into me, the boundless love, the endless missing, the void, the cause of her death, the unanswered questions around it, along with her pictures and her stories. This is me shouting, crying, praying, or simply - grieving.

I ask: does grief permit grief itself in its real essence?

Mumma misses you, Aabi.