Category: The signs

Grief

On By Indu PatikkalIn Blessing, death, divorce, father, God, learning the hard way, life, life lessons, opinion, parenting, Random thoughts, realizations, The signs, Tranquility, WomanLeave a comment

My father passed on Sep 3rd. The same day my US Passport was issued. It has been tradition that my life progresses when he visits me in the US. The first time he came, I bought my first house and got my green card. The second time he came, I bought my second home, a dream home. The third time he was here, I got my citizenship, and got divorced. The last page was getting my passport and that happened right before he passed. Thinking back, it is strange that my passport was issued on a Saturday.

3 Saturdays later I sit here on my couch watching an SPB concert on YouTube. My younger kiddo is playing on his PC upstairs. A Saturday I have longed for this entire year. There is nowhere I have to be, there is nothing I have to get done today. Even if I do nothing today, its okay. I don’t like roller coasters, I am shit scared, yet this year has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. A job change, my elder son graduation high school, researched and visited colleges for him, got divorced, cared for my younger son through his wisdom teeth extraction, sold my house, moved to another house, convinced my dad to come to the US for the third time, vacationed with my boys at Mexico, got COVID, appeared for my citizenship interview, saw off my son to college in another state, nursed my father during his last two weeks of life, held his hand as he passed, cremated him. And I am here on the other side, strong enough to tell the story.

The week my father fell ill and the week after his passing were the worst. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would google ‘signs of death’ for my father. But I read each one of them and recollected what my aunts or uncles or mom had mentioned when others in the family passed. It all started on Aug 27th when he started throwing up only to discover on Aug 28th that the endoleak from his aneurysm repair had caused an aneurysm rupture. Almost lost him on Aug 27th and Aug 29th but I guess he was not ready. He woke up like nothing had happened. Nursing him for the one week before he finally passed on Sep 3rd is what I consider as one of my biggest blessings. The last few days of a parent is the absolute last ask they have of their children. There is nothing after that. Absolutely nothing.

I have had some really strong eye openers these past 3 weeks. After he passed, the funeral home tied him in a white sheet, transferred him onto a gurney, strapped him and covered him with a fitted blanket. They loaded him onto the back of a minivan and took him away. Everything one does in a lifetime ends in the back of a minivan. How much we emote, stress our asses off, hold grudges, push and pull in relationships, things we want to buy, positions we want to achieve, the egos we manifest, everything seemed so meaningless in that moment.
I am a believer of the concept, where the soul lives on and the body is merely a cloth that the soul sheds when someone passes. I also believe in signs. Three days after he passed, I saw the brightest light, lighting up my garage as I opened the door in the morning to drop my son to school. I knew he was going. I have never seen that light before or after. The funeral home director placed the bag with his box of ashes in the front seat and fastened the seat belt around the bag. It appeared like he was sitting right there, I spoke him on the ride home. When I got home, there were 4 birds, I have never seen them before waiting on the trees around my driveway. Like they were there to welcome him home. That first night, deers from the neighborhood sat vigil next to the wall where I kept his ashes. So many signs he has shown me, strengthening my belief in the soul.

I have been perusing a lot these last two weeks after his passing, and I realized that two roles of my life that I had been playing for years, ended in a matter of months, that of a wife of 19 years and of a daughter for 43 years. I may be a wife again, but I will never have to be a daughter again. And that has been the strangest feeling. We get so used to the multiple roles we play, that of a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend, and we think these roles stay until the end. They do, but the realization that we stop being them is strange.

Suddenly I am not so sure what I should grieve for. My son leaving the nest or my father passing or my divorce. Walking into my son’s room and trying to organize his room is the most painful thing. I cannot bring myself to moving his clothes or looking for something in his closet. It is easier to hold my father’s phone or see his shoes outside the door or his glasses on the coffee table. Bringing a life to this world, giving that little human everything you have, taking every chance because there is no rule book and then letting them go is by far the most unfair transaction in this world. In the end parents are just bridges for the first 18 years of their life. When I left him in his dorm room briefly and walked out, I felt something leaving my body, maybe the umbilical cord? Weird.

Then seeing your parents pass and doing everything for their physical being, is just so unfair. And you go through that twice. It takes years to overcome (if you ever overcome) to push the sadness of one, that the other one goes and creates another layer of sadness that you have to push through one day at a time.

All said and done, I am not quite sure what I should grieve for or just let it be. As my therapist says put one foot in front of the other and take one day at a time.

Its real

On By Indu PatikkalIn life, life lessons, love, opinion, Random thoughts, The signsLeave a comment

Depression is real but it’s not sadness. Sadness is more mentally or lasts a finite time but depression manifests itself in different layers and stays a longer time. It is difficult to explain how depression feels and and that is why it is left untreated for longer periods of time. Depression and normalcy are so similar that it takes you time to realize that you possibly could be in depression. You could be fooling yourself that everything happening around you is the way it is so you convince yourself that nothing is wrong, and you need to adapt to your surroundings. If you think someone else can tell you that you are in depression then know that it will never happen. You need to assess yourself or get a person with a medical degree to assess it for you. 

You have probably read that it is difficult to explain how depression feels, like labour pains. It comes in cycles, the labour pain and depression. There are periods of self-confidence followed by  a phase of self-doubt. During the high wave, you are up for any challenge, you want to overcome the obstacles, you want to move ahead. It is a false sense of optimism, because it is short-lived. A truly confident person will stay confident for a longer period of time and have fewer bouts of self-doubt. So I feel, it is an act, or a way your mind plays tricks with you. Very soon, usually there is a trigger, that this false persona falls. You withdraw into yourself and stop yourself from doing anything. Yes, getting up from bed every morning is a Herculean task. All you want to do is curl up somewhere, not talk to anyone and sit in your hiding spot. It is very easy to go from a high wave to a low wave, a small trigger questioning you and you will fall flat. But that’s not true about moving from a low to a high. It takes a lot of effort and support to get back up there. It is a state where you are waddling in the water supported by a few hands around you, most definitely your therapist.

There is no answer to what depression feels like, but there is an answer to how one feels when going through depression. Life goes about between these bouts of high and low waves. There is rarely a middle layer. Even if you find the middle ground, it is hard to establish yourself there because you are used to being at the high or low wave. This middle ground is new. However, starting to find the middle ground is like starting to discover yourself, the real you, not the one clouded by judgement all the time. So how does one feel? Not very happy, not very sad, not content, its a blank state of the mind. It is easy to not react instinctively to something or anything. You will seem calmer on the outside, but inside there is a constant churning. It is confusing, yes, very much. Your focus is elsewhere. You are sitting with your friend listening to his/her story, but you are not registering anything. You will not be able to ask a follow-up question tomorrow, because almost everything they said did not register in your mind. You are in your own world, a world you cannot define for yourself. 

When depression occupies most of the space in your mind, focus is what you lose first. Focus on yourself, your job, your friends, your family, your children. There is a basic functioning, you live from moment to moment, however, you are absent from the moment. You may seem very normal on the exterior, but you know there is a storm inside you. You want to burst into tears, you want to sit and cry for hours, in the hope that maybe then, this turmoil will leave you. Unfortunately, you cannot cry. Your mind knows you want to cry, but every cell of yours does not support it. You want to laugh continuously for hours, but the most hilarious joke doesn’t seem funny anymore. At the most you will let out a smile. You want to sleep for hours, and this is probably you will be able to do, for hours and hours, because this is an escape from your otherwise turbulent mind. Watch television for hours and hours, because you are in an alternate world away from the mess inside your head.

I have thought hard about does one incident start depression? And my conclusion is no. Every experience in life manifests onto itself and leaves behind a memory. Either a strong one or a weak one, but it exists. Some are good and some are bad. When the bad memories accumulate and if you have a lot of these, over time your mind weakens over this accumulation and makes you vulnerable. Your mind is prone to attacks easily. So when a person comes by who stays in your life for a long time and punches you in your soft spot, your mind caves. It could be anybody. A friend, a spouse, a parent, a sibling. The hard part is you don’t realize while the bad memory is accumulating until much later when you have become completely vulnerable. Actually most people don’t realize when they have become vulnerable, but much later when they feel trapped. Some get help, seek out therapy, swallow a concoction of chemicals to balance the mess up in your brain. It is unfortunate that most people live their life in this vulnerability because either they don’t know they need help or are too scared to seek help. What will everyone think. This is the year 2020 and even today mental health is a taboo. It should be given equal or more importance than physical health. It is easy to heal someone physically and extremely difficult to heal someone emotionally. 

Employees cannot speak freely of therapist appointments with their employer. Spouses cannot talk about it in their family. The immediate reaction is that there is something wrong with you. Yes, there is something wrong, but it is not with me, it’s with my environment. And the counseling I am seeking is to help me cope with my environment. My environment has become so toxic that it is impossible for me to navigate through the toxicity without an alteration of chemicals in my body or without being able to talk to someone about how I feel. Nobody in my environment wants to listen to me or understands my position or wants to understand my state of mind. They are biased by their own opinion of the situation. In this situation the only person who can help is a therapist who is outside this environment and can see clearly and provide a neutral perspective. A therapist primarily allows you to feel how you want to feel and tells you its okay. That you can get through this. You will not be here all the time. That the sun will rise tomorrow and it will be a new day. Rejuvenate your hope.

There are extreme cases who try to take their life. Either they are successful or end up in a psychiatric evaluation center with others who are either in the same situation as yours or worse. I have thought about what makes them take that extreme step and I believe its their lack of faith in anything or anyone. They don’t believe they can come out of their situation or environment and there is no one to lend them a hand and pull them up. It is sad, in this world of billions of people there is not one person who can extend their hand. So it becomes all the more important to seek help early on. The only person you need to listen to in this situation is you. Depression is real and it is not sadness.

Day 3 : Life lessons – People in our lives

On By Indu PatikkalIn Blessing, God, life, life lessons, opinion, Random thoughts, realizations, The signs, WomanLeave a comment

This is a quote by Mother Teresa and I totally believe it. There is a rhyme and reason for every person in your life. Even the sales guy who drops in once in a while selling things in their goody bag. Recently, when I was in a mental turmoil about my job, my friend, my family, my father, one late evening there was a knock on my door. When I peeped through the glass window, I saw a young lady standing there smiling with a stack of books in a hand. I opened the door and left the door half closed, half open because I didn’t know who this person was and it was pretty late. She told me, she was studying and selling books to help fund her education. Because it was a woman and because she mentioned education I decided to buy a book from her. I paid the money, got the book and out of nowhere she asked me, “is it okay with you if we pray together?” I was caught by surprise. Nobody has come to my door with this request. I said okay. She stood there outside my door on a dark night and prayed for me, my children, for my happiness. It could be a sales gimmick, that’s what you would think when you think from your head. But I tend to think from my heart in such situations and felt a strange calm after she left. I did not get the answers to my issues in life immediately but I got the assurance the God is seeing everything, He is watching over me and He will show me the way just before the turn.

She came to me with a purpose. She was a blessing.

I have been blessed many times over with the presence of women who have taught me “what not to be”. A certain member of my extended family thought it was her primary responsibility to domesticate me. I was Katherine the shrew she had to tame. At that time I was naive and took a big hit on my self confidence, self respect. But in a few years, He jumped in, held my hand and walked me away. Through the whole ordeal I learnt more about myself. The levels to which I could be downgraded, how I would fight such situations and come out a more confidant, self respecting woman. There were other women who through experiences taught me very well, to the comma and to the dot, what not to be. Those were exemplary life lessons.

Life teaches you everyday the purpose of each person and whether they are a blessing or lessons. God tactically places them in your life so that you can evolve into the person you truly are!

Blessed!