It is indeed a long read, if it helps you in the minutest way possible then I will feel blessed.
A very close cousin of mine passed away recently, and I am devastated since then. He went for his usual morning walk on the terrace at 6 am, and at 6.30 am he collapsed and died – just like that. He was 54 years old, had had a intercaste marriage 30 years ago, was childless, and had built his own house just a couple of years back. I visited him in June 2023, and was about to visit him in June 2024, well..…
Honestly I have not been so down emotionally even when my father died in the year 2005. It of course was bad, and tragic, but then it wasn’t unexpected. I knew astrologically when he is going to breathe his last (unlike my cousin, who never trusted me for my astrological prowess), and also he wasn’t keeping well for a while. But then the present episode shook my base completely. May be because of two reasons – one it was completely unexpected, and secondly somewhere I feel I am just 6 years away from 54!
I have been deeply thinking, comprehending, retrospecting for the last few days, and myriads of thoughts have engulfed me. Sadness, anxiety, despair, grief, fear – you name the negative emotions, and I am filled with it as on date.
“Why am I feeling so bad? What was so special about my cousin? What kind of vaccum has he left behind? Death happens everyday, everywhere – we witness it. We, and all our close people all are going to die one day for sure – we are aware of it. Then why does death of few people affect us so much? Why doesn’t our logic help us find a concrete answer? Why does the thought of God give no immediate hope? Why doesn’t the idea of hell or heaven provide any solace? Why doesn’t the concept of eternity and ‘life after death’ make any sense at the right time?
I went back and forth to the same set of questions again and again, to see if any insight helps me figure out the possible answers. And I tried going to the very basics of human structure that the almighty created with utmost love and care – the mind, the body and the soul.
What actually happens to us when someone dies? Infants, kids, teenagers, youth, middle-aged, old people, women die everyday, everywhere for 1000s of reasons. They die due to health reasons, accidents, murders, wars – you name it, and we know it, but then we don’t sit and cry for everyone. We ignore. We cry ‘ONLY’ when our close people die or I should say someone with whom we have an ‘emotional’ connect dies.
On the physical front our skull doesn’t blast or our limbs don’t fall off or our eyes don’t pop out when someone close dies. Our soul remains unmoved, and intact. But it is our ‘emotions’ that get shattered to smithereens, a concept the human society talks the least or bothers the least about.
A lot of scientific researches are done to address physical ailments, and people are made aware of them time and time again. But then what about ‘emotional’ ailment? Not many talks about it.
Exercise, meditation, positive thinking, spirituality, religion – they are all ways to balance your emotions, but then most of the times they turn out be escape routes and fail to address the real issue at hand or cure you completely. How do we deal with our emotions? How to safeguard ourselves from emotional turmoil? What to expect on our emotional front? What is emotional preparedness? How to heal emotionally? Is it possible to cure yourselves emotionally, completely? These were the new set of questions I was asking myself.
Once a wise man told me, ‘your life is just a set of memories’ hence I travelled back the memory lanes to find some viable answers that would help me deal with the present situation and in the process help my readers as well.
Between 1975 and 1992, I lived in Bombay; studied in Vikhroli till 2nd standard, and then we moved to Dombivli where I completed my 10th grade and also my 12th. Between 1978 and 1992 – we visited our native place, Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu) every year by Jayanthi Janata train for summer vacations, and we spent almost 30-45 days there. Yeah, we would have missed 2 years max in these 14 years, but we visited for 12 years for sure. In the 30-45 days we spent in Tiruppur, we visited my cousin’s house once. And every year without fail, he along with another cousin of mine took me to a movie theatre riding doubles with me on their bicycles – sometimes to Bruce Lee’s movies or sometimes Jackie Chan’s.
My cousins never went to school instead they started to work and earn since the tender age of 5, as child labour wasn’t a serious issue those days in Tiruppur (the largest exporter of knitted garments in the world). And yes, they used to smoke since the age of 7 – thanks to our super star Rajini Kanth.
So in a year, the maximum number of hours I would have spent with my late cousin would have been 10 hours per year (no letter correspondence or phone calls whatsoever in between)! That adds to 120 hours in 12 years, which is not more than 5 complete days out of 4380 complete days in the physical realm. That number is any day negligible when compared to the number of days and hours I would have spent with my schoolmates, college mates, office colleagues, and my building community folks.
We shifted to Tiruppur in 1992, and I studied in Coimbatore living in a hostel between 1992 and 1997 – completed my graduation and post-graduation, and again moved back to Bombay for work till year 2000. In these 8 years, again I would have not spent much time with my cousin. Post 2000 I have been living in many places; again never spent many hours with him. So if we add everything together I would have not spent more than 20 complete days with my cousin in his entire life. Then why so much pain when he died, which cannot be matched by the deaths of anyone else with whom I would have spent more time in school, college, office or any other places? The simple reason being – we live with our loved ones in our ‘minds’ more than in physical realm. They stay etched in our mind’s ‘support system’ more than in the real world. We don’t actually miss the physical presence of an individual we love or care about, but when they die – it becomes literally impossible to take them off from our emotional system, where they happened to be existing with us every minute, every hour, and every day of our life.
The levels of emotional connect we have with a particular person or place varies depending upon the reciprocity of the other and the kind of emotions it triggered while you existed with them physically.
Let us say in your teens you fell in love with a beautiful girl, and she reciprocated positively or negatively, but in either case it kindled a particular ‘emotion’ within you that which in turn is connected to various other external factors; the place, the weather, the environment, and some movie song that was famous during that period of time. Today if she had got married to someone else, and you got married to someone else and after 20 years, if you are walking through the same street, or spot the same chai wala, or whenever the same music gets played – you are going to get disturbed. If by chance, that was the very road you have been walking for the last 20 years, you would have become immune to that emotional trigger, and if not then there is a way to know if you are emotionally healed or emotionally sick still. If the feeling brings out negative emotions to the fore such as – anger, anxiety, confusion, dejection, despair, fear, grief, hatred, sadness, or tears – it simply means you are not healed, and you need healing.
We humans also unfortunately connect emotionally to places, buildings, and people we have never met or will never be able to meet in our real lives. The intensity of your response depends upon what kind of emotion it/they triggered in you on the first place.
An ancestral house being demolished, where you had great memories with your cousins as children is going to make you cry. An old cafe being brought down where you sat and drank your tea for close to 10 years is going to make you feel bad. And death of a celebrity or a sportsperson or a movie actor who catered to your excitement is going to affect you terribly. The bad thing is not about crying or weeping or missing them here. It is about how long does the same event affects you the same way. If it does, you are in grave trouble – and you need to attend to it.
MEN Vs WOMEN
Being a male chauvinist myself, I need to accept and announce loudly that ‘women’ indeed are emotionally very strong when compared to men. Men are weak, and God has created the two genders that way for some odd reasons.
Whenever there is a heartbreak, have you ever met any woman giving in to alcoholism? Or becoming a chain smoker? Or committing suicide? Even today the number of suicides in men are far more than women – the simple reason being men cannot heal themselves emotionally well.
The search for bigger reason or purpose or truth of life has been always a man’s initiative. No woman has ever left any kingdom to find the bigger meaning of life. No woman has ever got into a cave alone to download God’s commandments. No woman has ever been on a journey to conquer the world. When someone stays emotionally strong, there is not much to be done in the world. You can just relax on a beach sipping your beer. And not that women don’t get emotionally disturbed ever. They do; public shaming/rape and loss of children are the biggest loss for any woman, which they can never ever come out of or completely heal.
EMOTIONAL HEALING
There are three ways you can deal with your emotional sickness.
1) Become immune by deliberate indulgence
2) Emotional healing by deliberate indulgence
3) Escape
ESCAPE
Most men refuse to accept their weakness or sickness, and after few days of mourning when the tears stop flowing automatically they think things have become normal and they get back to work believing they are healed. But no, the emotions get bottled up and they keep revisiting in regular intervals for years together. Unlike men, women don’t get back to normal chores very soon. They cry for days together, mourn for weeks, and they come out healed but not men.
The men to whom the memories revisit fail to understand the reason, and now they are tired and want to escape the disgusting feeling it brings; hence they give in to drinking or drugs or smoking. Hence even today if you visit a bar, middle aged men will be still talking about their lost love that took place in their teens.
There is another way of escape men choose – they stop talking about the subject or touching the topic. They try to forget it completely, which again doesn’t work in their favour because memories are going to come back if not today, then tomorrow. There is no escape but to heal yourself.
BECOME IMMUNE BY DELIBERATE INDULGENCE
If something is affecting you terribly, and making you feel sad or unhappy – then keep doing the same thing again and again till the stimuli does not bring out any response at all.
For instance if you are afraid of walking through a street where your parents were cremated, then keep choosing the same path again and again – till the route does not bring out any negative emotions in you.
EMOTIONAL HEALING BY DELIBERATE INDULGENCE
This is a physical exercise/activity that I chalked out that can be carried out only if you meet me in person, whenever you feel it is absolutely necessary.