Reading Time: 6 min
Yesterday was the first day I was alone at home since you left us a month ago. Ten minutes into it, I realized how the silence of the house felt different. Not difficult in the sharp sense of pain, but difficult in its stillness. No sounds, no presence, just an emptiness that is no longer temporary—it stretches out into the days, months and years to come ahead. The faint sounds of TV, your humming when you are tinkering with your plants or cooking, your peeking into our rooms and asking what did you eat or just showing me a random message on phone that made you laugh. It is not that I don’t feel that you are with me. I always feel you are with me. I just don’t feel you around me. That hurts. I hate it.
If fate can be overcome by tears, let us bring tears to bear upon it: let every day be passed in mourning, every night be spent in sorrow instead of sleep: let your breast be torn by your own hands, your very face attacked by them, and every kind of cruelty be practiced by your grief, if it will profit you. But if the dead cannot be brought back to life, however much we may beat our breasts, if destiny remains fixed and immoveable forever, not to be changed by any sorrow, however great, and death does not loose his hold of anything that he once has taken away, then let our futile grief be brought to an end – Seneca (Sixth book of the Dialogues)
Drowning the silence
I tried what Seneca suggests. I kept myself busy, drowning in work, being loud on calls. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was blasting across the house, the sound of violins bringing a rainstorm of emotions as Winter falls by. I thought perhaps I could outrun the silence, but the silence was all around me. For 15 years, it was just the two of us in a house – us against the world. I saw you in your lowest after dad. You saw in my lowest. But we both recovered. I love the life we built. We were happy. You were happy. Seeing you smile and hearing you laugh made me realize I am not doing bad as a son. The silence of not hearing that laughter is deafening. The silence that lingers at the edges. That hurts. I hate it.
You always said that you would be wherever I ended up being around. Be it a giant mansion or a tiny apartment, you will go wherever we are. And now you are not here. That absence carries its own weight—something you cannot touch but cannot ignore either. The silence of the footsteps, the silence of grass breaking because she broke a tumbler, the sound of her phone ringing. The silence of the absence is painful. That hurts. I hate it.
Accepting the silence
What unsettled me most was not grief in its rawest form. Grief exists. I have experienced it. But I had forgotten how quiet this silence is. – the realization that this quiet, this hollow, is now part of my everyday life. A house that once carried your voice, your presence, your warmth, now holds only echoes – of your memories, your shadows, your legacy, your life. And in those echoes, there’s a strange mix of comfort and ache—comfort in remembering your words, ache in knowing they won’t be spoken again. The ache has not decreased yet, it is too soon. Despite the silence, the mind is loud with a cacophony of voices – voices of grief, with memories, with emotions; everything reminds of everything. That hurts. I hate it.
It is one month today. Exactly. One month of not hearing your voice. Not giving you a hug every morning. Not kissing you bye before leaving for work. Not arguing with your over random stuff. Not sitting with you in the living room as you have your morning tea. We are adjusting to a new life. I am not ready for it but still doing it. That hurts. I hate it.
Accepting life
Such is life. We will keep moving forward. The world has shifted forever. My world changed overnight and no matter how much I want, I cannot change it back. Some moments will keep reminding me that a part of the world has shifted forever, and the silence will always have your shape. I just have to learn to listen to the silence of grief. Give myself time. Maa, I love you.
Last month has been the longest of my life. I kept going back to my own words for solace. This post still gave me a lot of strength to carry on. The featured image was clicked in rice fields in Bali. The image below is of mt mother in those fields. The above image is clicked in Maldives in October 2022. More pics on my Instagram
