On Grief and Privileges
Seeta and Geeta were sisters who used to work at our house as domestic help. They would keep chatting with us while going about their work in the house. It was evident, even from the outside, that both sisters shared a very close relationship.
A few years back, Geeta moved back to her village along with her husband, while her 18-year-old daughter, Shampa, stayed back in the city to pursue her career as a dancer. Geeta wasn’t worried though, she had left her in the faithful hands of her sister, Seeta. Shampa was living by herself in a small 1 room apartment, not too far from Seeta’s home. She would keep visiting her Seeta Mausi every few days for dinner.
It was a regular Sunday morning back in the lockdown when we got a call from Seeta saying she wouldn’t be coming to work that day. They had lost Shampa to suicide. Seeta and her husband had been trying but failing to get in touch with Shampa for the past day when they decided to visit her apartment, where they found out.
We were taken aback by the news. Shampa was a smart girl with a bright future ahead, all of us had witnessed the efforts Geeta had put in to raise her and build her a better life. Geeta would sometimes bring along little Shampa to work with her, and we would play together. To hear she was gone was deeply disturbing.
Geeta and her family hadn’t met Shampa in a few months, ever since the pandemic had struck. I couldn’t even imagine the magnitude of her loss.
We were still reeling from this news when we saw Seeta walk into our house the very next day. None of us was expecting her to be at work, at least for a few days. She picked up the jhadu and started about her work as per usual, taking breaks in between to sob and talk about Shampa. She told us about the state of Shampa’s house, it was in shambles, and there was no food or ration in the house, and that had probably been the case for a few days. The dance studio where Shampa used to work hadn’t been able to pay her for a few months. With no end in sight, there was no knowing when and if things would get better, and maybe that is what led Shampa to the edge. Seeta felt dejected that Shampa hadn’t reached out to her.
But something kept bothering me. I still couldn’t understand why Seeta came to work that day. I remembered when I was grieving a personal loss, still a student at the time, it took me at least a week to even come out of my room, and here was Seeta, back at work the very next day after her niece’s death, albeit with puffy eyes and intermittent sobs. Why did she feel the need to come back? Was distraction her way of coping with grief? Or maybe it hadn’t even struck her that it was okay to take time off and that she didn’t have to get back to work immediately. Maybe there is some truth to Maslow’s hierarchy, maybe having your physiological needs fulfilled is a precursor to love and belonging. I concluded that maybe taking time off to feel, process and grieve is a privilege, one that those from less fortunate backgrounds, like Seeta, couldn’t afford.
Not too long after this incident, one of my cousins passed away unexpectedly. The loss was sudden, too premature and we were all shaken. The atmosphere in the house was sombre, and we all kept ruminating about the various what-ifs and if-onlys.
The very next day, I found myself logging back into work. It had been a few months since I had started working at my first job. The sensible thing to do here would have been to take some time off. I could have easily asked for a few days off, but I didn’t even bring it up. Had I become so transactional in life to not even be affected by the passing of my cousin? I did conclude that I had the privilege to grieve. What had changed in the 3 years since the last time I found myself in a similar situation?
As a student, I was able to take as much time off as I needed. I could pause and grieve and take as much space as I needed to navigate and process the loss. But now, as a professional, I felt the need to put a timeline to my emotions, expecting myself to hustle through the weight of grief. Work was a part of my life that I couldn’t put on hold indefinitely. I needed to have a deadline for when I would be returning to work.
But subconsciously I knew that even beginning to process this loss would unpack a lot of unpleasant emotions, that I’m not sure I had the bandwidth to feel. It would get me off track and require me to be patient with all of myself, including the messy and anxious bits, for as long as it took, maybe weeks, even months. Suppressing it and returning to work was the easiest option I saw at the time to keep myself sane. But it is hard to keep working as if nothing happened. There also comes a sense of guilt upon distraction, as if the loss means nothing.
Looking back now, the need to pick myself up and move forward was so strong, that I didn’t give myself the space to just be human. But was it just me or is it something systemic? Maybe our systems are designed such that we’re expected to keep moving, hustling, and being productive to our own detriment. Our modern culture doesn’t make much room for us to pause and slow down, implicitly deeming it as selfish and unproductive.
But is it life that gets in the way of work, or does work get in the way of life?
