I Hope You Search For Different Kinds Of Love In This Lifetime

Last year in the month of May, on a random Thursday, I was scheduled to catch my trip to Paris for the completion of my degree, and as usual, I walked into my grandmother’s bed and informed her that I would be leaving tonight for my flight. Usually, she would react with a smile and ask, “When are you going to return?” But this time she seemed to be looking through me. While it did bother me, I knew I did not have much time to spare. I waited for a while, expecting she’d signal something, but she didn’t. My family said they’d write on a slate for her later because I needed to get going with all the packing. I did as advised, boarded my flight, and arrived in Paris safely on Friday. My mother called me on Saturday morning to tell me that my grandma had died peacefully in her sleep.

My 89-year-old grandma exemplified a totally different kind of love. While she couldn’t speak much for the last eight years of her life owing to repeated jaw displacements, her attention to detail, daily routines, and interest in the lives of her grandchildren never faltered. Our kind of fun was to mess around her and annoy my siblings in order to make her smile. With time, our interactions become more of a signaling than talking. Unknowingly, my family and I had aligned my schedule according to her needs. Caring for my grandparents was a decision my father made early in his life that I didn’t understand at the time. Today, I realize how fortunate I was to have my grandparents’ love.

Losing my grandmother while being abroad was difficult. I didn’t know how to process the loss. Life moves on and you start moving on, but you know you’re somewhere stuck in the rotating web of memories. The ebbs and flows. The happiness and sorrows. The feeling of loss is something you really don’t know until it hits you hard one fine day. The mundane routines are undoable. You try very hard to draw a consensus and have some control of the situation. But your mind wanders to define the reason for your existence. What am I here for if I have to die eventually? Sometimes you figure out your purpose and sometimes you just keep going, hoping that someday you will find your reason. 

My memories with my grandparents are what I’ll cherish the most. And hoping that someday when I look up at the stars, I’ll see it twinkling for me.