In a heartbeat 💔

Anybody who’s lived through a full, lengthy Canadian winter is parched to see colors other than the gray-whites of frost, storm, and cloudiness, and wistfully longs a pleasant outdoor walk without being hit by blasts of frigid breeze. I don’t dislike the winter. Winter is charming for a few, but by the time one gets to February, the days of the winter might certainly seem endless and lead to despair.

By March, spring in the Northern Hemisphere finally arrived; although with heatwaves across, it was barely ‘spring’ in India, and in Canada, it came as a mixed bag – we had a couple days of warmth, a couple of rain, and then some more chill.

Our life events at the start of spring mirrored exactly that inconsistency of the weather. On the morning of Holi, we first spotted the 2 pink lines on a test we were hoping to see for a few months now. It brought us hope and a tinge of joy but it was too early to celebrate this sort of stuff, or was it? Anyway.

A couple of days of the fuzzy feeling was followed by black clouds of grief. We lost Naana. All of a sudden. Out of Nowhere. In a heartbeat.

85-year-old Naana was not just another grandparent – who are mostly old, and a few other things. Not that at all. He was a small-part old, but so many many other things. Most grandparents become irrelevant to their grandchildren probably because one cannot sustain a conversation with them due to the gap in time. But Naana was all kinds of progressive, liberal, well-read, well-informed, and clear with his principles in life (which he expressed but never expected others to agree with or follow). And he was doting. And not afraid to express his love to his children, every single time. Seldom would my phone calls with him ever end without ‘I was waiting for your call my lovely child’ or ‘I love you Komal’. I’d lost my indulgent grandma many years ago, and since, no one had doted on me the way Naana did, and expressed it in so many precious words. He was SO proud of all his children and grandchildren.

He was a grandfather, father, friend. It was one man in flesh, but many roles that he played in our lives on different days. It was a loss of multiple people who were close to us, and who we would call upon often to guide us and show us the way, and wasn’t it a pity that we didn’t even know how many to mourn? (Edit : And this still hasn’t changed, because we find ourselves remembering his words on different days in different times, a whole six months later.)

Suddenly, March was meloncholy.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

– ‘The Trees’ by Philip Larkin

Meloncholy with a (pink) hint of hope, because when has life been one shade of frosty gray-whites at one time for anyone?