The Hierarchy of Grief
The Hierarchy of Grief
By Dipika Mukherjee
For the past two years, Dr. Nash has been prescribing sedatives and antidepressants. It must be the medication slowing my heart down so that I can’t climb any stairs. And the breathlessness that wakes me up at nights, gasping for air and finding none.
I am alone on such nights. My wandering irritates no one; there is nobody to be disturbed by the sound of the TV at three in the morning, when insomniacs are peddled things they don’t need. There is no child to climb sleepily on my lap, such weighty love.
Dr. Nash has shepherded me through the past years; she knows how fragile I have become, I, once undaunted by life. I once thought the universe modulated its flow to make my life easier, to make the desires of Aneesh and Anwesa come true because of the merits of past lives and daily prayer.
Then the Malaysia Airlines flight disappeared, like a star extinguished in the night sky, taking Aneesh and Anwesa from me. I flew to Kuala Lumpur earlier than I was expected.
******
When Kyra hooked me up to the ECG machine at Dr Nash’s office this morning, her hands were clumsy. She is young, interning while waiting for medical school acceptances, and very apologetic. She peeled the monitors off my skin again and again. When the sheets were printed out and Dr Nash told her to wheel me into the emergency room at Northwestern Medical, she stumbled near the elevator, pitching me forward. My blood pressure registered 181/120. They did another ECG at the emergency room and mumbled about T-wave abnormality.
Kyra asked whether someone could be with me, and when I said no, she didn’t press further. She bought me lunch from Saigon Sisters upstairs (thoughtfully Asian and only slightly spicy), and I ate on a gurney in the emergency room. Kyra looked defeated when she left.
Now I am in the cardiac care unit, a place filled with old men my father’s age. I think of my father, so far away, seated in front of the TV, windows open to the tropical heat and pollution of Damansara Utama because he can’t bear air-conditioned rooms. It is early morning in Malaysia; my mother is reading the papers over her morning tea.
There is a cry from a room opposite, then sobbing, then it all goes quiet.
I know now to interpret signals of grief. Sobbing does not come to everyone, such easy relief.
******
I am watching the screen; a human heart in action. It is a beautiful thing, this pulsating pumping masculine organ within my female body, creating lines that squiggle into mountains and hills with flat lands in between. I hold my breath, wondering if it will change slightly. It doesn’t, this mechanical thing. The black lines on the page continue a traitorous path.
Anwesa is a writer. She talks of black lines on a page and their ability to transport minds like magic. She is learning to read and write Bengali now, and delighting in curlicues of the script in her mother tongue. Aneesh and I tease her about being an American Born Confused Malaysian finding Bengali roots in college, but we are secretly thrilled that Anwesa is a freshman at University of Chicago, and still so close to home.
Was close to home.
Ina, the technician, shifts slightly, allowing cool gel to probe the underside of my right breast, and a long tongue, flapping as if torn, appears on the screen.
“Is there a problem?”
Ina is measuring cavities and edges with precise red cross marks. “That’s a valve that blocks the regurgitation of blood. Perfectly normal.”
“Would you tell me if you saw something abnormal?”
She smiles. Her eyes are kind, used to dealing with frightened patients who find themselves in this room without much notice, but then again, maybe she knows. “The doctor will read these images and speak to you later. Let me put it this way...if I see something concerning, you won’t get on that treadmill.”
“So if I take the stress test, my heart is fine?”
“I can’t tell you that.” She carries on probing.
The radiologist is a blond Midwesterner who probably wants to be out on the streets, just like Ina, ushering in another New Year, with its promise of new beginnings. Instead they focus on the pulsating screen.
How did my heart keep on pumping through the months when it seemed so much easier to just give up? I willed it to give up, for my body to also become a non-corporeal thing, spiraling towards Aneesh and Anwesa in a galaxy of stars. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. A young English poet, I forget who, had written those lines, and died an early death. Anwesa had driven me crazy memorizing that poem for a slam event, juxtaposing the macabre lines with a modern poem on police brutality on black bodies. She had performed this at the Printers Row Literary Festival; on that bright summer day filled with young families buying books from makeshift stalls, that performance left the audience bewildered.
I now understand the conceit of singing in a dark garden, the happiness of death. I once stopped taking the medication that regulated this body, controlled my hypertension, until I had simply collapsed, needing to be whisked into Northwestern Memorial’s Emergency Room in an ambulance that shrieked past the holiday crowds thronging Michigan Avenue, and into a room of people asking me whether I knew which year it was, who the President of the United States was, and which city I was in.
I am becoming old friends with Northwestern Medical but the only room I really want to be in is the morgue.
******
I have seen therapists. I have mourned with Aneesh’s family and mine in Malaysia for thirteen days, loud bhajans every evening, the community coming together as a protective comforter around me for the two months I stayed. I followed the rituals, even taking imaginary cremated bones to the Malacca Straits on a boat and setting the flowers-that-were-their-ashes free. I eat nothing made out of any cereal at ekadashi, no onion, no garlic, no meat.
Nothing helps.
No one warns you that grieving is a game of one up-manship. In Malaysia, women who been widowed, parents who had lost children, even women who had miscarried...they all came to tell me they understood my grief. An Aunt told me about a neighbor who lost both her sons in a car crash, as if losing one child was easier than losing two, as if death was a hierarchy of grief. I grew tired of the ‘How Are Yous?’ when no one understood how I tottered from moment to moment, veering between disbelief and hope.
So I came back, to Chicago, which has been home for the past four years but where we are still strangers. In this big city, I can go for days without talking about Aneesh or Anwesa, teaching my students, then returning to the closet where I sleep surrounded by Anwesa’s fragrance. Sometimes I sleep on Aneesh’s shirts, the ones casually discarded in the laundry basket.
Dr. Nash wants me to not read the news reports or watch TV anymore, at least until I am stronger. So I don’t. But this morning, on the purple line to Evanston, the man across me was reading the Chicago Tribune and there was a picture of a little boy, like a doll, washed up on the shoreline.
My heart started to pound. I thought of the parents of this child, prayed that they were washed up on some shore like this, instead of bearing the worst curse of humanity. I got off at the Dempster. I sat in the train station for an hour, but my heart would not subside.
******
I know the drill by now. Ina asks me to get on the treadmill, run until I can’t run anymore, and then quickly slide onto my right side on the examination table before my heart has a chance to slow down. I have my running shoes on.
“Good job,” she says. “This isn’t very comfortable, I know, but you’re doing great.”
She knots the hospital gown over my chest as a male technician walks in to look at the screen. He nods.
“Can I go home now?”
“Probably,” she says cheerfully. “We’ll have to wait for the doctor.”
They will not find anything wrong with me. The midnight MRI, the stress tests and EKG... all will be clear. No Evidence of Ischemia, No Arrhythmias, Normal Resting BP with Appropriate Response to Exercise. I have done this too many times. Random pictures - a dead child, a plane in the air - sets my heart palpitating and sometimes that forces me into Dr Nash’s office, then the hospital.
I imagine Anwesa in the firmament, her hand clasped in Aneesh’s, and I know he will never let her go. If one of us has to be with Anwesa like this, Aneesh is the intrepid parent, her doting dad. But usually, this image is followed by Anwesa plummeting to earth with terror in her eyes.
Maybe there is a hierarchy of grief. I mourn for Anwesa in a way I don’t for Aneesh. Perhaps we both mourn for the child we birthed, but only one of us has been sentenced to a life of cruel and unusual grieving.
******
The nurse wheels me back to my room, where the TV is on. The dead Syrian child has a name now and the talking heads are debating on why the Middle East isn’t taking in any refugees, whether Europe can accept the burden of more; one man calls the parents selfish for putting a child on a boat.
Even if I don’t read the news, I know that what is happening in Syria on land is worse than the risks at sea. But why did we, Aneesh and I, take Anwesa away from Malaysia? We didn’t put her on a boat, but we too cast ourselves adrift from everything familiar. The Malaysian government was fanning a brand of ethnic politics that had ushered apartheid into Malaysia, especially in education; it was no longer a place for bright young non-Malay people like Anwesa. When his multinational company offered to transfer Aneesh to Chicago, we grabbed this opportunity for her.
That is what we told ourselves as Anwesa wrote through an alienated year of High School, grieving for home, as one of the few brown kids in her class. Always searching for something a flight away, Anwesa went to Malaysia for a few weeks in summer every year. We had taken Anwesa out of a failed educational system, a country festering in corruption, but we had also taken away who she was before she could become someone new.
How long does it take to belong in a country? Our forefathers, Aneesh’s and mine, had sailed to Malaysia from India almost a century ago. We were third generation Malaysians. Anwesa was the fourth.
MH370 is still a mystery. The politics of Malaysia do not make the news in Chicago, for Malaysia is no Syria, torn apart by a civil war or overcome by Islamists. Even the Malaysian anti-government rallies are peaceful. I don’t remember much from the first two weeks back in Malaysia after the disappearance of the flight, but I know we were allowed no public rage, herded as we were into newsrooms as pawns and dragged out if our grief became a national shame.
Our children are not washed up on seashores. They have disappeared, as if they had never lived.
Is there a right path? Sometimes we get to choose our own passing - a slow erosion or a sudden goodbye – in this life. No one should mourn my death. I will leave this earth of borders and nations, soar into a place that has Aneesh and Anwesa waiting, a space large enough to embrace us all.
”The Hierarchy of Grief” was shortlisted for the DNA-OUT OF PRINT Short Fiction Contest and appears here. Reprinted by author’s permission.
Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the novel Shambala Junction, which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her short story collection is Rules of Desire. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, The Commons, and Chicago Quarterly Review, among others. She is a Contributing Editor for Jaggery and teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and at the Graham School at University of Chicago. She holds a doctorate in English (Sociolinguistics).