I could never pronounce the words: “Bye nanu, I love you.” It feels surreal, like he’s disappeared into the mist of hours, his memory now echoing through the void of time.
And then I realize: I will never hear my grandmother call my name again and my heart hurts, my stomach turns. Can I really say goodbye ever?
Living in Whitby, I was thousands of miles away when I heard the news of my nanu’s passing on November 4. She passed away in Pabna, Bangladesh, which also happened to be her hometown, a place surrounded by pain.
In Bangladesh, COVID-19 cases have exceeded more than 1.5 million, with nearly 30,000 deaths as of December. During our phone calls at the beginning of the pandemic, Nanu told me that she would hear announcements from the local mosque and from people on rickshaws passing by. brandishing a microphone and speaker, announcing a list of names, some even knew, who died due to the virus. Names sounded daily in his neighborhood.
My nanu returned to Bangladesh in January 2020 from New York City, where she emigrated in 2005 to be with my aunt and her family. She was excited to spend her final years in her country of birth with her younger sister, but by March 2020, the pandemic had gone global, separating even those with the means to return home.
So, like many others, we were forced to rely on calls from Facebook and WhatsApp. Since she was a teenager, every phone call we shared always ended with her saying “Bhalo thako. Sustha thako. Where is the best, khoda hafez? before hanging up. It roughly translates from Bengali to English as “stay well, stay healthy, we’ll talk again. God be with you ”, and he repeated it. It would become our last exchange, through a phone call.
I told her throughout the pandemic how I would plan to visit her in Bangladesh when border restrictions and health measures were less restricted. She was also ready to emerge from the pandemic, to socialize and live her final years and had even recently received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. But a sudden deterioration in the last two months of his life changed its course. We did not anticipate that we would lose it so quickly. We thought we had more time.
As I write this, I know that I am not the only one who shares the burden of grief in dealing with the death of a loved one around the world. Pandemic or no pandemic, is a common experience faced by immigrants or those separated by borders, where the only way to stay in touch is through pixels on a screen or by phone.
Death and despair have become all too common in this pandemic, crippling as the increase in deaths is only seen in numbers. Ontario recently reached the grim milestone of more than 10,000 deaths due to COVID-19. No time to cry as more storms roll in, no sense of peace, no sense of closure.
As much as it hurts to think about it, I was afraid of missing this moment to reflect on the incredible life my nanu had and gave me in the midst of all the ongoing pain. Working in journalism makes it more difficult, and the bad news accumulates one after another, hour after hour. Hoping to take a moment to be still with my pain, I approached a grief counselor for advice.
“Well first, no, you are not alone”, Karima Joy, a registered social worker with private practice, focus on the experiences of grief and grief and marginalization he told me.
Joy, who also leads the grief education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Professional and Continuous Learning, as well as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said that “many people have stolen their final goodbyes”, which is “not sitting well with people.”
There are no quick fixes for pain, adds Joy. “Because (the pain) is not linear.” Instead, we need to learn to “swing” between pain and present life, where we allow ourselves to “digest” and become familiar with our pain.
“It’s normal sometimes to be in the pain wells and then maybe in an hour, you feel different and you’re ready to go shopping and then maybe you’re crying in the shower and then maybe you’re distracting yourself for Netflix, that’s absolutely normal if that’s your process … rather than a closure, how do we reframe it in how we can digest the pain? ” she said.
She suggests that we find creative ways to “honor our loved ones” and “honor our pain,” such as producing our own rituals to remember the lives of our loved ones. This can lead to “ongoing bonding” in the process of our grief, Joy said, which is about “how you continue your relationship with (your loved ones) in a new way.”
Joy also spoke to me about “disenfranchised pain,” which she says is a “socially unrecognized form of pain.”
“For people who haven’t been able to say goodbye, they carry an additional layer (of) an unfinished feeling of pain that is important to recognize, important to recognize,” Joy said, adding that it makes it harder to say goodbye.
What I took away from this experience is that no matter how painful it is, it is important to take the time to remember your loved ones. I’m doing this now by listening to music and watching movies that nanu liked. In this way, I feel like I am creating new memories of her.
My nanu’s name is Nadira Khanum. Your nickname or “roof name“It is Parul, an ancient Bengali tradition in which a baby is given two names, a legal name or”bhalo naamAnd a nickname that only family and friends know to call them.
Nanu got its name from the five-petal flower, parul, native to the Indian subcontinent. And as beautiful and vibrant as the flower, my nanu was an artist. She was trained as a child in a variety of classical Indian dances, including the Bharatanatyam and even after breaking her hip bone in an accident as a teenager, she never missed a beat. As a child she taught me to move, despite my two left feet.
But growing up in Bangladesh in the 1940s and 1950s (then part of India and later called East Pakistan), it also meant witnessing hardship and human suffering. My nanu lived through World War II, the Partition of India and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. He survived polio, smallpox epidemics, famine and a military dictatorship. Seeing all this destruction, she made sure to take time to heal and give back to the world in any way she could, from feeding the hungry to visiting patients at the local hospital, sharing a conversation with people on the street, and even stopping. to greet the animals. She was grateful for life.
She also gave life, giving birth to three children who gave birth to seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren who will be forever blessed by her gift of life. I am who I am because I met her love and I will carry her with me until it is time to leave.
The wound of the death of a loved one during the pandemic will bleed for a long time. The death of my nanu will be a deep and traumatic wound that my family will manage to caress over time and that will eventually become a scab and then a hard scar. Never to forget, but to appreciate.
Reference-www.thestar.com