Of late I’ve encountered the many stages of grief but I had read that there were 5. Elisabeth Kubler – Ross tells me, that there are 5 stages of grief. We grieve by denial, followed by anger then we bargain, moving slowly into depression and finally acceptance. I did feel that denial is like steady rain, it’s there outside your window but you can’t hear it quite for it is so symmetrical, so ordered that the absence of chaos makes its presence an absence. So, for me denial was like this steady rain that was there but not there. I couldn’t engender it in a sentence and make a speech for its existence in my routine.
Denial is almost beautiful – you have faced an ungodly act of destiny whereby suddenly you feel all you know is what you didn’t know, what you couldn’t fathom, see or hear. I lived in a state of denial for three whole years, whereby I saw things that were real but I denied their existence. My mind questioned the very sanity of my thoughts, I had not a single soul, not a mirror to reflect onto my feelings an ounce of truth. There was denial, for three years, sitting beside me like a ghost of my own actions whispering into my years that this cannot be.
When there were enough voices, coming out of bodies made with flesh & blood I believed. I slowly believed in the truth, the inspiring uplifting truth. The beauty of which is, it is a slap in the face of a hysterical child – you snap out of denial. But followed by realisation is another childlike emotion which is quite nasty. It’s like a dragon breathing breaths of extinguished flames. Your body is filling up with extinguished fumes or that is what you think. I have heard people tell me things about passivity; the thought of crimes of passion, the imaginative sand castles that aren’t that innocent – what really happens when the floodgates of hell open. Anger takes over. Anger has a funny way of changing your very core. I was asleep or sleep walking. To suppress your anger is quite like tying a rottweiler’s face – the moment you untie it, there will be blood.
What happens when your anger is to no end, no true purpose?
it aches.
I suffered at the hands of anger for a while. Someone said it’s quite poisonous; I understood the fallibility of other people better, though. My mind told me, they are humans prone to making ugly decisions, decisions that hurt others. I’ve made some too. I have hurt people, walked off when I thought it suited me, it was better for my own well-being. However, all the good-human-talk is of no use. By the end of a good day, the nasty thoughts are back and I was angry again. Will it make me a horrible person to want to hurt someone physically, to wish another human being dead? Of course it will. Anger just helps you break a few moral barriers and the human ones too.
This morning I sat thinking to myself, am I going through the regular model of grief. For I felt I could forgive. For a moment, I could pity & see the frail loneliness that they suffered too. I could see through all my aggression, how they were just bound by the longing for a love unrequited. I guess, I have been there in his shoes. I have learnt to love better ever since. Here I was experiencing compromise, without even knowing it. I will continue to bargain I suppose, in my pleas to hurt less or to turn back time, but the rational Ego knows better. I couldn’t for a moment control my Id I felt, it was wayward it wanted self-mutilation, it wanted to drink the rationality down or to put into a silent state of slumber. I’m better than that, I know. That self-knowledge does mostly come to rescue.
Did you know a cold wind, strongly blowing the breath out of you helps? I didn’t. Now I do.
I think there is this one stage that Kubler-Ross didn’t mean for us to know but discover. The phase of ‘being’. Where you learn to ‘be’. It is beyond acceptance for you have accepted what is, what cannot be and how it happened. You’ve given up the arms you took up against God, humans & chance events knowing your own ineptitude as an insignificant tiny human on a map of billions. I think in the middle of all that dust settled books, the piles of unsorted clothes & the mess of medicines at my bedside I found I was still uneasy – nothing had changed really. He was who he was, she was who she was. I was, well an accident. I could now be with the rationale that accidents happen – all the time. I could be alone with myself and smile because accidents do happen. This time one happened close to home. That was all.
The Existentialist Bathroom Thinker 