The Beginning of The End

Hi, I am Ravi. On 4th May 2021 I lost my wife, Poorva, (34 yrs old) to Covid. That’s not it. Within a span of 2 weeks during the horrible Covid wave, I lost 4 more of my family members - my mother, Asha,(73), my brother, Kaushik, (40), my sister-in-law, Vrinda, (38) and my father-in-law, Vijay (64). And while all of this was going on, I was in ICU fighting to stay alive for myself and my 2 kids at home, 8 and 1 yr old girls, who were in care of my mother-in-law, the only other adult surviving member in between the two families.

But, this blog is not about those 2 weeks when Covid ripped apart my beautiful family. Those weeks are a blur. I remember kissing my wife for the last time while she was finding it hard to breathe through her oxygen mask. I remember messaging my brother and literally begging him to fight for another day. And I remember this period for the last time I saw them, each one of them.

I intend this blog to be a place where I pour my heart out for anyone who has felt grief to let them know that they are not alone. I want my daughters to read this when they grow up and make some sense of all this. But mostly, I want this to be about good memories and a safe place for myself where I can seek refuge from my thoughts when they are too excruciating to bottle up. I want this blog to be about life, love, memories, happiness, and hope. Hope, that I did not have when I was gasping for breath in the hospital, and hope that I did not have when I came back to an empty house, which was not a home anymore. But, in hindsight, I knew it was hope that helped me survive lying still in my ICU bed, when nothing made sense anymore. It was hope to see my kids again someday that kept me going through the darkest of times. And it is hope that still keeps me going most days, when it is far easier to give up and refuse to continue.

I remember those early days back from hospital when I shut out the entire world because I could not stand it. I could not understand how the world kept on going like nothing had happened when my own little world had come down crashing in almost an instant. My entire existence felt meaningless. Afterall, how could you attach meaning to irreversible loss? How could I make sense of anything now? How will I live? How will my kids live? How does life go on this way?

None of those questions could be answered then or now, probably they never will be. I know I will have to live it out to figure out some of them, but not really. Even as we hope to figure these questions out, I don’t think we will ever know why we lose our loved ones. Why we love and then it all goes to dust like it didn’t matter. Grief is a strange feeling. You make peace with it after a while because you have to. You come to accept that it is the price you pay for love. And like love, it will always be with you. Most times having its way, overpowering you and making you weak. But some days, it sits beside you like an old friend and holds your hand, and gives you comfort in your loneliness. It makes you feel vindicated that what you lost was genuine and worthwhile while you had it. And you can’t have love without the grief. They are two sides of the same coin and there is no more coin toss when the grief side comes up. It stays that way.