August 8, 2025

Making Room for Absence: How We Get On, Somehow

“Ashrat-e-qatra hai darya mein fanaa ho jaana,
dard ka had se guzarna hai dawa ho jaana”

“It is comfort for the drop to be annulled in the sea,
For when grief exceeds all bounds, it becomes remedy.”

It begins, awkwardly, in the quiet. The sort of silence that feels loud, settling around your shoulders like an old cardigan you didn’t ask for. If I were to be completely honest (and what use is there in anything else?), when my aunt died, nothing happened the way I expected. There were no elegant metaphors, only a sudden lack: conversations cut adrift, visitors shifting their feet, then departing politely. Then, only the hush and me, wondering if I was meant to do something or just wait for the next instruction.

You’ll find, as I did, that loss is terribly practical in its inconvenience. The world continues; shops open on time, bins get collected and you remain responsible for sorting your socks and remembering to eat something resembling a vegetable. Grief, it turns out, isn’t a sweeping drama, but an odd, day-to-day muddle: forgetting your keys, staring at supermarket shelves, watching people buy cereal as if nothing extraordinary has happened at all. Life, as it does, gently insists on maintenance, even when something in you feels broken.

The Odd Business of Grieving Brains

If you’re lucky enough never to have been derailed by heartbreak, you might think grief is simply feeling very sad (perhaps with extra sighing for effect). Not so. The brain, apparently, has a whole itinerary for you. There are hormones and rewired circuits, familiar routines that no longer fit. People talk about “the process” and “moving forward” as though it’s a filing system you’ll soon master. Meanwhile, your head invents its own rules.

There are scientific facts (I looked them up) about attachment, cortisol and something called the nucleus accumbens (which sounds like an architectural feature, but isn’t). Simply put: the brain learns someone isn’t coming back, but at its own slow pace. So you keep glancing at your phone, expecting a message, before remembering. The world has a gap in it and your brain wanders around, poking at it, trying to make sense of the new geography.

How Grief Puts You at Sixes and Sevens

There are physical symptoms, although nobody brings you a leaflet. You feel tired, as though you’ve been running uphill, only you haven’t left your chair. Your memory goes sloppy, details slide off. Sometimes you’ll sense them; voice, perfume, the feeling they might walk through the door and there’s a brief, silly hope before reality resumes. If there is a dignity in mourning, I haven’t found it. Mostly, it’s about muddling through, making endless cups of tea.

Tears arrive at the most inconvenient times (well lit, public places, ideally). The experts call it the amygdala, but it’s just that part of your brain responsible for making sure you embarrass yourself at the pharmacy or supermarket aisle.

Love and Other Aftershocks

Here’s the truth: the ache ebbs and flows, but it doesn’t vanish. You simply amend routines to accommodate their absence. There are days, ordinary days, when you feel almost yourself. Then a fragment of memory, a familiar phrase and everything tips sideways again. You can’t mark grief on a calendar; it doesn’t care for schedules.

The world expects you to “move on,” but actually you just gather up bits of your old self and carry them, wobbly, like a badly packed suitcase. You are changed, subtly, deeply, but still here. Survivors always have laundry to do, after all.

Why This Matters

People are keen to move past sadness, to tidy it away. But grief, like happiness or hunger, is stubbornly real. A sign that you dared to care and were cared for in return. Mami’s rogan josh, her soft scolding, her laugh. None of it erased just because she isn’t physically moving about the kitchen any longer.

So I’ll say this: you learn (by default, not by choice) to walk with a missing piece and to be gentler with yourself and perhaps others, because of it. Grief, inconvenient and unseen as it is, is the evidence of having lived with your heart ajar.

And so, to those we have lost and to those who miss them, here is the quiet, small, ongoing tribute:

There’s a space no one else fills. That’s extraordinary and surprisingly, enough.

Dr. Sheetal Raina is the founder and editor of ISBUND, an immersive platform dedicated to preserving and celebrating Kashmiri culture. Deeply connected to the heritage and traditions of Kashmir, she brings a distinctive voice to cultural discourse - blending academic insight with heartfelt commitment to her roots.

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