Chapter 6 [Covid] – Stumbling Around

The year was 2020 and I was back in Canada after my trip back home. It had been difficult going home, walking into a house where someone you love once lived, their room exactly the way you left it, missing a crucial piece that had made it a warm and loving place for you. Memories in every corner of the house, flooding your heart with longing for someone you can no longer hug. My entire life had revolved around my dadi, whose emails were always immaculately typed, who would – like many Indian dadis – oil my hair on Sundays, who had snacks hidden in the cupboard (that I would invariably raid for a midnight meal) and who would be restless until I got home – an act of love that drove me crazy then, and fills me with longing now. A woman who was fiercely independent, but who had lost that independence, along with her memory and the things that made her uniquely “her” by that age. But mine was not a dadi, mine was a mother and a father, a child and a friend all rolled into one. My life’s anchor and often my lifeboat. I know when I look back, that it was losing her that made me lose myself. I didn’t know who I was if not the girl who would put everything on hold to attend her calls, who would plan her life schedule around her dadi, who would spend hours sitting in her room in quiet companionship. When it was time to go to bed, she would lovingly ask me to sleep in her room. And I would. In the later years of her life when she was mostly home, I was her bestie and she had always been mine. 

When we mourn people, we also mourn the loss of a relationship and the loss of a part of our identity: the part of us that was someone’s grand daughter or daughter, or even parent or sibling. We mourn the loss of that part of ourselves that is gone along with the person we’ve lost. I’m not sure what all it was I was mourning at the time, but I had determinedly carried on that semester after I lost her. I had somehow kept going and despite the breakdowns, I had some good days too. Perhaps because it hadn’t hit me just yet. 

That March, after 9 months of a long distance relationship, Arnav moved to Canada, and landed in Toronto 4 days before the first lockdown. Schulich informed us that school would be closed and for the rest of the semester (or so we thought) our classes would be virtual. My internship was also going to be virtual. We learnt that school may be closed until July – and it sounded crazy at the time. The period when everyone was home, making dalgona coffee, playing Ludo King and connecting with random acquaintances on Houseparty was a twisted time – bad news all around, and yet people were more connected than before. With little to do and nowhere to go, we were all a bit more united. Arnav (who had made our Campus his home by then and fully embraced the student life without being a student), my flatmate and I were each other’s company during those months. We spent the whole day together, cooked together and even openly shared when we were feeling low. At some point I’m certain we had lost our minds. Looking back at some truly hilarious videos from that time confirms these flashbacks. 

We were living in our bizarre campus bubble where it was impossible to avoid people but we were trying. We threw covid birthday parties with 6 people in attendance, everything purchased from the dollar store. As students with no money and no place to buy anything, we got creative. We made up our own drinking games, our own work desks and rearranged furniture multiple times before realizing nothing could make Assiniboine look better. 

 We were so scared of leaving the house one time during quarantine, that we fought over milk and ordered a carton for $18 on uber eats. 2 hours later we laughed at our own stupidity. 

This was a time when our happy bubble sometimes found holes in it – and through those holes came the sadness and loneliness of being away from home and our loved ones, adjusting to living together and being stuck for days in our apartments. For me, my first panic attack also came somehow made its way into the bubble. I knew it was different from the anxiety attacks because this time I felt like I couldn’t breathe. One night as I was struggling to fall asleep, I felt restlessness rise up my belly and throat. I left the bedroom but only made it to the stairs before I fell to the ground, crying. I started typing a WhatsApp message to my dadi’s number and also went through her last few texts to me. Nothing could have prepared me for that – the texts I had forgotten about, that I had just reopened, were full of notes saying she was sitting in my room after I had left for Canada, was touching my things and thinking of me. She was wondering where I was and what I was doing. Just as I was now sitting here, wondering the very same thing. 

The breakdown that followed opened the door to many other similar panic attacks over the next year. For months, I would get triggered by random things around me. One time I found her dupatta with her smell lingering on it. Another time I found a picture of half her face from our last FaceTime. There were so many such incidents and Arnav would find me on the floor many nights, struggling to breathe. He was the only one who instinctively knew how to help me in those moments and hold me until it passed. 

Strangely, I was going about my day the next morning, thinking it’s something that I am going through because of my grief but exists parallel to my usual life. So I worked part time, worked on my internship, went about my MBA assignments and also cooked – the usual day for anyone. But it was catching up to me while I was merrily thinking the panic attacks were a way to process the grief. They were not. They were a physical manifestation of the unprocessed shock in my head and heart. I had not had the chance to “see” my dadi, and as such my heart had not reconciled to the fact that we had lost her. The primary emotion at the time was not pain, but longing. As if someone wasn’t gone, but had altogether disappeared one day. 

Funerals I think, are meant to help us process the loss. Without it, we don’t know how to categorize our emotions and reach acceptance. That’s where I was in 2020 – in between the stages of grief, oscillating from one to the other, depending on the day. 

I was never a religious person, so my anger at “god” was strange to me – because I was mad at something I didn’t know if I believed in. So I started searching in the direction of what I did understand: the heart and the mind. I spoke with a therapist who conducted constellation therapy, helping people understand inter-generational patterns to create understanding of family dynamics. To be honest, I had just reached out to him because I wasn’t sure where else to go and he had previously been one of the best therapists I’d ever had. Another time I did what makes sense to some and none to others – in my desperation for answers, I reached out to a psychic. I don’t know how, but it helped me get closure. I think it was a combination of the conversations I had with my family, the therapy I sought out or the answers I got from the psychic – but put together, I was slowly starting to process what had happened. 

When I started getting to the “acceptance” phase, I also started letting in the grief that I had tried to block out. That was the worst time, because it was months of pure anguish.

I had hit my rock bottom. “There’s nowhere to go but up” I told myself. Then came 2021.