“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” Joan Didion.
I knew I was going to lose Debjani long before I lost her but I was not prepared for what I felt when it actually did. I didn’t realize how profound death is, how permanent and how unrelenting.
There is no chance to say that one thing you really want to tell her today. No one to receive the text message saying, “Incidentally I think I see my first wrinkle”. There is not another chance to get a glass of wine together. No chance to ask her what color should my wedding dress be? Death is unrelenting.
You think you understand the permanency of death, but till you’ve lost someone so close to you, you don’t.
It turns out that grief can be bottomless, just when you think you’ve hit the nadir of grief, you realize you’ve just skimmed the surface. How much pain, how much anger, how much bitterness you can feel are things you don’t realize.
You don’t get that you will literally reel in shock for months. You don’t realize that you’ll program her phone number into your new phone, because you don’t expect to be the crazy person who feels that when her best friend returns, you’ll need the number again.
You don’t think about how you’ll walk around envisioning your own death and how it could impact those you love. How many things you’ll avoid doing to prevent your loved ones from the kind of pain you now feel. You’ll avoid getting on motorcycles even though you love bike rides. You know you’ll never go hand gliding or white water rafting.
These things may have been on your bucket list but your bucket list will change. Hand gliding will be replaced by “spend more time with the people you love, because you don’t how long they have left”. You’ll look at life through the lens of death. You’ll finally understand mortality.
I struggled with this post. Should I have written something that told you more about my best friend or should I write about how the year after her feels. I know it may sound self-pitying but how profoundly I felt the loss of Debooh and how much I changed from it, is a testament to our friendship. This is the best way I could convey what her death anniversary meant to me and what she meant to me.
