After the After

This one is about loss, grief, and what it quietly teaches you. I lost my nani around four months ago, the first close and deeply personal loss I have ever experienced. People often say that no amount of preparedness can make loss easier. In my case, there wasn’t even the illusion of preparation. One day everything was fine and flourishing, and the next day it just… wasn’t. Grief knocked on my door absolutely unannounced. Perhaps it came when I was already at my lowest, silently grieving and fighting battles I had already lost count of. Loss has a strange way of choosing its moments… rarely when you are ready, almost always when you are already tired.

But even before this grief could fully reach me, something else was waiting to surprise me. For her cremation and the prayer meet, I saw people arrive from different places, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues of my mother, my aunts, and even my father. People who had known her through fragments of life, through occasional visits or conversations, travelled all the way just to stand with the family for a few hours, simply to be there. Because of certain circumstances, I had to travel to and back from the cremation alone. And let me tell you, strangers on those flights were kinder to me than most of my own people, or perhaps, to phrase it more honestly, people I had always believed were mine.

For several days after her passing, someone or the other from my parents’ circle - a neighbour, extended family, or an old familiar face, kept checking in on the family. Sometimes it meant stopping by the house for a few minutes, sometimes it was a call simply to ask how everyone was holding up. I didn’t always know how close they had been, but their presence, however brief, carried a quiet reassurance during those days. Watching the people around my parents made me realise what companionship once looked like. Even acquaintances showed up with warmth and sincerity. Friendship, in comparison, feels like an even deeper commitment. Yes, there is a generation gap. A large one. But there is also a connection gap. And grief somehow exposes that gap more clearly than anything else.

My friends here at the institute, people who had never even met her,waited for me to come back just to have dinner with me, so they could make sure I ate, and that when I do, I wasn’t alone, so that I wouldn’t get consumed by my emotions. And yet there were people who had met her multiple times, people who knew what she meant to me, yet didn’t seem to notice the silence I was sitting in. People often say, “Maybe they didn’t know how close you were to her.” 

But most of them knew exactly what this episode meant to me. My father’s colleagues did not stop to evaluate how close he was to his mother-in-law before showing up. They did not need that information to decide whether empathy was appropriate. They simply understood how to be compassionate. That realization stayed with me. I understand that everyone is busy and caught up in their own lives. But we live in an age where our phones are with us almost twenty-four hours a day. People of my parents’ generation didn’t have the luxury of instant communication. No WhatsApp messages, no quick video calls, no voice notes sent in between tasks. Letters sometimes took weeks or months to reach. And yet somehow, their relationships seemed stronger, warmer, steadier and more present. They were busy too, building careers, raising families, figuring out their own futures. But they still remained connected.

Today we have the luxury of calling someone while doing something else entirely. You can talk while driving home, cooking dinner, folding laundry, or scrolling mindlessly through your phone. How much does it really cost to check in on someone? Just a few minutes. A small pause in the middle of a busy day. And yet we often don’t. Instead, we hide behind familiar explanations : “I’ve been busy,” “life just took over,” “I meant to check in but time slipped away.” It made me pause and wonder what mirage of connection we are living in, where we are so oblivious to each other’s lives while being endlessly consumed by our own.

Maybe those explanations are not always untrue. Life does get busy. Responsibilities do pile up. But grief has a strange way of revealing something uncomfortable… the quiet difference between being busy and not making space. What good is that constant connectivity if we cannot send a simple text, a small voice note, or make a quick call while doing something else? People once maintained relationships through handwritten letters that travelled across cities and countries over weeks and months. So what exactly is this fragile notion of “being connected” that we believe in today?

This experience has changed me as a person. It has changed the way I see bonds, assurance, and presence. It has also, in many ways, changed my circle into probably just a line segment. I won’t say that I have become bitter, but I do hate how life sometimes has to break you and bring you to rock bottom just to remove the blindfolds you didn’t even know you were wearing. And just when you think life cannot possibly surprise you anymore, it does. Always. Because grief doesn’t arrive alone. Grief reverberates. Grief oscillates. Grief echoes through realizations you were not prepared for. I didn’t know this side of grief before, the one that doesn’t only mourn the person you lost, but also confronts you with the absence of people you thought would stand beside you.

Loss is painful. But indifference is annihilation. Loss hurts because something precious is gone. Indifference hurts because it makes you question whether something was ever truly there. And perhaps that is the strange, difficult lesson that grief leaves behind, not just the memory of the person you lost, but a clearer understanding of the people who remain.

That realization is what comes after the after.

And to anyone, anywhere, grieving in ways I may never know of : a small virtual hug.