I have been pondering over huge losses and unexpected turns which became our lot this last year. We lost abba. His presence, his being, his voice, his support, his strength all gone from our lives and in place a deep and dark abyss. An abyss so deep that if you look into it it looks back luring you into its desolate regions. In this blind darkness you struggle to find your way because life will be. And, you just cannot opt out of it, chores have to be done, kids have to be fed and sent to school, you have to eat and shower and so on. We think mistakenly that in case of tragedy we will stop living, we will also come to a halt and time itself would pause, but no matter how heart rending an event is nothing stops in its wake. It is sheer cruelty to see nature and time looking on indifferently over our misfortunes, they don't care have no opinion on it. And that makes tragedies ever more tragic. Abba went away one fine Sunday never to return to us, but time never noticed, it went on passing as it has always passed. And that is most unnerving and in a way insulting to our existence. Do we not matter at all? When my father ceases to be shouldn't nature and time break its routine and pause if only for a while? but no nothing happened our feelings of loss and anger and shock went unnoticed! I hate the callousness of nature and its rude snub to whatever happens in our lives. I hate its arrogance in just being, in its own immortality, the pride it exhibits on its immutability.
We become bystanders. We experience our losses not as a party to it rather stay on the sidelines and witness what unfolds with heavy laden souls, we feel scared of whats more to come, what else will befall and torment us and test us. That is what we can do and nothing more. Be a mute bystander, an onlooker, a statue! Please spare me the rhetoric on how we can overcome our grief, how we can defeat fate and be once more 'normal'. I hate self help rubbish and empty phrases like 'this is life' and 'we must accept' and 'go on' and so forth, obviously we do go on like I said there isn't another choice but why say it at a time when going on is the last thing we want to do? Why do we become so stolid, so stupefied , so stultified in the face of grief. Why is it that in millions of years of human history we are so incapable of dealing with losses and grief and death. Why does it make us behave in such strange and inexplicable ways.
Where are the Greek tragedies of yore and the Shakespearean drama which always made nature an active participant in the affairs of men, Lear's torment and madness is reflected in the tempestuous storms that lash the land and rend the body and soul apart! All Greek epics use nature and gods as taking part in the drama of human life, Odysseus ordeal is mirrored in his fateful voyage home in which nature at times hinders him and at other times helps him. Where is this nature now? where is this luxury of time now? the Trojan war lasted ten years, Odysseus voyaged towards Ithaca for more than 20 years, but we? we aren't given that liberty by time and space to mourn and feel bad, just feel bad about how rotten all is, how wrong this world is because someone we love no longer 'is'. What does that mean? that my father is no more? I fail to comprehend it, it doesn't make any sense to me. It is a non-sentence, defying logic.
Maybe I'm dull, maybe I'm stubborn but I'm not going to accept this. It cannot be that someone who is so much a part of you and who you are and a person who is alive and breathing ceases to be. I need to find him and I believe if I look hard enough I eventually will, no, I certainly will!
I want time and space to be on my side. I want the world to stop. I want nature to revolt. I want things to move backwards and I want all destroyed to smithereens because that is what I feel inside. Those feelings have no relevance in the world of today where all is well and all will be well no matter what I feel on the inside. I reject this world which is so hard, so strange and alien to what happens to us. I want my father back and I want that time should bend backwards to bring him back! that is all I know and care about.
I want Abba back too but the tragedy is, like you have put so well, that time stops for no one and things always move forward whether we like it or not......nature is cruel and our loss is only ours to mourn.
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