BackGrief, she confessed
Make some space to share grief with children, not just anger or silence
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I haven’t gone back to that building or even that school campus in 25 years and yet I could walk through the school gate, turn left, enter the building on my left, take the steps up to the second floor and show you exactly where I was standing next to my English teacher when we had this long and extraordinarily intimate conversation. There was a low white wall next to me with a rounded ledge and my left hand was on it throughout, holding on for support.
I was 16 years old and Deepa Raghavan was my English teacher. I was smart, popular and happy, but I was also a very troubled teenager.
I had chosen Humanities subjects in class XI and there was a feeling that real life had just begun. Finally I was studying exactly what I wanted to. From having been a back-bencher for the last four years, I now sat in the front seat in the centre of class, lapping up the history, economics and English lessons.
When Deepa asked me what was the matter, I knew she had seen something.
“You sit right in front of me, you are an eager student, you volunteer for everything Natasha, but you look so sad," she said to me. “What is the matter?"
I had nothing to say immediately. I must have mumbled something, even tried on a weak smile.
“I’ve been watching you for a while," she said. “It’s very distracting. What is hurting you? Is something going on at home?"
Everything was all right with my life. I was thin but I was strong. I had inexplicable stomach aches but I was healthy. I was quiet but I was also boisterous. I had many crushes and occasionally I stalked them during lunchbreak.
I was incredibly sad too. I was wounded and confused. I knew my life was supposed to matter, but it just didn’t feel like it did.
We were reputed to be one of the best schools in Delhi. That seemed to be an end in itself. Everywhere around me, aggression and pushiness were rewarded. There were no quiet spaces. No time for gentleness, for sharing.
We had moved cities and schools. I had lost friends and grandparents. Two of my friends had lost their fathers in the year we turned 15. Both of them had been alcoholics. The Air India Boeing Kanishka had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean after a mid-air bomb blast on board. Indira Gandhi had been assassinated a few years ago. My brothers and I had watched homes set on fire in our neighbourhood. Two Sikh boys in my class had returned to class with their hair cut for the first time in their lives. Guneet’s family business had been destroyed in a fire. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone for a long time.
Our lives were privileged. We were winners, destined to be successful adults. We didn’t acknowledge our wounds. We didn’t stop to be tender. To heal or help others heal.
“It’s all right, these things happen. Move on now," adults would say. “Nothing happened to you, don’t be so sensitive. Grow up."
I coped with the dissonance in my soul in many innovative ways. Over the years I had had an imaginary Russian mother, a gaggle of aunts who were funny and interesting, imaginary pets and gadgets, a twin brother who died...and some very real, very intimate friends who were always there but you could not meet them, because they didn’t really exist.
I coped by losing weight. I don’t know if I ever really ate a full meal. I look back and wonder if a lot of those black holes of teenage angst were just hunger that I had learnt to suppress.
Everyday injustices, harsh words, bullying, humiliation, callousness and the misguided sense that children are dumb and don’t really understand much takes its toll on all of us. We insist that children must be moulded and trained and fundamentally changed from their natural state of being a child. It is a universal assumption that innocence is the antithesis of smartness.
That day in school, my teacher held on to me till I opened up to her. The corridors around us went silent as the next period started and all the students went back to class. Deepa didn’t let me go.
“My best friend died," I said to her finally. Not being able to understand the burden of intangible grief I seemed to be carrying with me, I had created a concrete reason to grieve. In the story I lived in my head, my imaginary friend had died that summer.
“Natasha, my husband died two years ago," she said to me. “My children lost their father. He was an officer in the Indian Army. He was injured on duty in Kashmir."
Here was an adult, sharing her own life story with me, consoling me. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself. She was asking me to stop feeling sorry for me. It didn’t matter what was hurting me, she was showing me how we can cope.
“Do you see me sad?" she asked. My English teacher, recently widowed and a mother of two children younger than me, was acknowledging my grief and inspiring me to recover.
As I type this, 132 children and 10 adults have been massacred in a school in Peshawar, Pakistan. Children are being lowered into their graves by a city in shock and despair. My own children will hear about this in the morning assembly in their school. They will stand silently for 2 minutes to mourn for others like them. They will feel hurt and wounded too as they try to make sense of the news.
I started to write about my teacher and me, and I will revisit this story next time. For now I leave you with this: If you really want to protect your children, help them heal their hurts by acknowledging them. Make some space to share your grief with them, not just your anger or silence.
Natasha Badhwar is a media trainer, entrepreneur and mother of three. She writes a fortnightly column on family and relationships.
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