The Great Shift

For as long as we have been aware, we have witnessed the countless faces of this life. Our life span allows us to observe how different people live differently, and we comprehend that not everyone has the same structure in their lives. And not just ten or twenty or fifty, but many, many factors play their part in every one of our stories. On top of this, it neither begins at the same tone nor does it carry forward in the tone on which it started. There are crests and troughs one experiences throughout. With all this happening, we steer through, every day, all the time, with each of our normals.

Among the crests and troughs, there do come mountains and craters, giving us all the unimaginable highs and lows also. Here we realise the beauty and the darkness of this ever-uncertain journey. Our brains wired, now genetically with the NORMAL phenomenon, survive and build on each and every one of these; we define our own happy, unhappy, and regular.

Yet, I am now in a state that I am unable to classify. I am very clear when I say there has been a shift in my life, and where I am now, can never fit the generic classification anymore. I can say so with confidence because I am able to specifically identify the happy, unhappy, and regular till the day it all shifted. And I am sure, others like me will also never know the state their life has landed in, after the death of a child. Trust me, it takes all the muscle strength in me, and all of my mental consciousness to even type 'death' and 'my child' together in a sentence. Many might understand.

There has been a shift in where life is today than it was before the passing of my Aabi. Where life is supposed to drive purpose from all the experiences and all those who are your people, it suddenly loses grip in my case. When a parent is parted from their child because of death, the universe shifts. For sure! There is a mental makeup in humans that allows them to understand the death of people they love, but that mental understanding is somehow completely absent when it comes to our own child. Although we have heard of children dying all our lives all over the world, when it comes to one's own child, the shift is unbelievable! There is nothing that can compare to the horror, the grief, the brokenness, and the emptiness that follow.

Those, like myself, who are still parents to another child, will agree that motherhood shifts. The way you look at your son/daughter here with you now is not how you felt for them since you had them. Maybe you were a mother or parent to one or two or more children, doting, enjoying raising them, loving the different phases of their life, and cherishing the moments, feeling blessed. Then you had this second or another child, who changed you in ways you didn't know. Giving you new meanings. Raising not one, but two or more dreams together. Being present for your child no matter what, comes inherently. We stop being a mom or a parent to one, and now we have two or more, and that is what we become. We cannot, ever, go back to being what we were. When we cannot do that while all of them are alive, we obviously cannot, ever, do that again, if one of them goes away, be it in any way.

This shift is eternal. Is natural. When you bury one of these dreams, you bury the entire future. There is no argument here. The mother or the parent you were, to two or more of them gets buried with the one whom death took away. There goes, with them, the way your love poured out to all of your children. You no longer breathe for a future, for a tomorrow you wish. You breathe because you have to, and because you have no choice. You have a child there with you, who has been separated from their sibling, and you have a responsibility as a parent to provide. We still provide, because we are still left with that ability to, but with the constant heavy ache of failing to provide for all of our children. With a constant realisation of not being able to help or do what we intended to, for all the children we brought into this world. And this constant reality, the finality of it, the no going back to making amends to it, makes every single act a task. Tasks drain us. No matter how much motivation, love, or passion they are performed with, they tire us.

The shift being, we begin tasking all day, every day, all the time. Instead of raising our child, we start performing a responsibility. The love is there, forever to stay, but the body, the mind, the consciousness has shifted, has changed, permanently, in that very moment. The breaths now hold a heaviness, a guilt, and are no longer something I own. The sorry feeling, for all our children, here or not, that we will forever fail to give them what we intended to, and will be able to give them only what we are now able to, is uneasy, unsettling, and brutal. Carrying this feeling is not a choice. No amount of wisdom, no amount of shared experiences can take it away. The days are no more wished for. The normalcy is no longer expected. The future is never on the mind anymore.

The real struggle - feeling one of your children at all times and only being able to feeling them. This single untangible feeling paralyzes the mind, freezes it. There is no beauty in it. Every time you hold your child here, you miss the one not here. Every time you hear this one call out to you, there is a voice that forever remains to follow, and the ears will forever long to hear. The constant imagination simply tears us apart every time. As a parent, you do not have an alternative choice. The pity you feel for your child who is here, as they have lost who we were as the parent they knew and that they will always search for that parent, is a significant and huge feeling that comes in uninvited, like all the other unwanted realisations.

There is no doubt we love and cherish our child here, and there is no measure to that, but not just the way one would have always done. We cannot feel complete in any way anymore. Our body aches in this incompleteness, and will continue to remain in this pain, for as long as we live. Our love for both or all our children doesn't change with the way they are present with us.

Living this shift can never become a part of any evolutionary process, no matter how many generations of humans come and go. For mothers and parents in this, I am sure every shift is unique and painful in its own way, and only you would know how you live it every day. As we now know for sure, even when there is nothing left to do for our child, loving them is what will still always be there.

I am a mother of two beautiful daughters. My life did not allow me to do everything equally for both of them, but I will love them just the same. My heart carries them together, and my mind always holds them in the same space. That is where I live now, in the memories already made, in the moments already past, with both of them together.

Scared all the time now, as I learn to give a future to one of my children, here, I gently weave and softly knit the essence of the one who is not here into her days and into all of her tomorrows.

Dedicating it all to Aabi and to the lovely little ones who make us whole, no matter where they are now.