On Grief
Me and grandpa at my 5th birthday party which he orchestrated.
TW: This is a story about grief, trauma and death.
The trigger
Last Saturday, I learned, at midnight India time, of a piece of news we’ve been dreading of receiving as a small remote company that employs around 40 people, 10 of whom India-based. Someone’s parents (yes, plural), died. Of Covid. And that someone works for us.
She is 18. She is bright and cheerful. She uses memes. She is responsible. She checks in on people to make sure they’re okay.
And now, her parents are gone. She is on her own from now on.
I did not take this news well. Truth is, I just could not fathom this news. My brain could not understand where to place this kind of grief.
I randomly cried in the middle of the night, consecutively for 3-4 nights in a row at 3-4am.
I cried in front of a board member talking about how great of a quarter Hacker Noon’s been having. He turned my therapist for 5 minutes straight.
I became the workaholic version of myself. And by workaholic, I don’t mean I work a lot. I mean The Only Thing in My Mind was Work. I worked from 3am to midnight. Sometimes I worked from 4 to 1am. I was productive as hell.
I took several baths a day, during which, I thought about work. That was my drug. That was my getaway. That was the only way I knew how to cope.
“Why the fuck are you so upset? These are strangers! You did everything that you could” - my brain told me.
It took me a minute to understand. But in order to tell this story, I have to go all the way back.
The daughter that got away
My grandparents lost their sole daughter before she turned 13 to some brain disease triggered by a cold. She was the oldest of four, had 3 younger brothers, including my dad, who’s the second oldest. My grandpa was a musician, and was on a music road trip that day she went to the hospital (and died shortly thereafter).
He never got over The Guilt of not being able to go back in time for his daughter’s eventual death.
My grandma was a construction worker, who was always busy working and taking care of all the children. She leaned heavily on her sole daughter and eldest child’s help, as mothers do.
All this happened, of course, long before I ever existed, so all I ever heard of her was stories, poems written by grandpa, a couple pictures here and there. According to those accounts, she was perfect in every way. A great daughter. An attentive sister. A stellar student. She didn’t deserve to die so young.
Both of my grandparents, but specifically my grandpa, was beyond delighted when I was born. I was the firstborn daughter of his second child, his de-facto oldest kid because of his oldest’ death. I became the embodiment of the daughter he lost.
I was basically raised by him for the first 10 years of my life. He wrote hundreds of poems about me. He took me to singing lessons and concerts and all types of performances. He taught me the violin and wanted me to also be a violinist just like my dad.
He was never gonna let me go.
My grandpa and dad had a pretty intense fallout when I was, of course, aged 13. There was some kind of battle over who actually got to chose my life path (academia vs. music). In the end, my grandpa lost. He and dad stopped talking for about 2 years.
I became that daughter who got away (again). This time, no one died. But when I put away that violin years ago, I think something did die.
The guilt
Fast forward many years later, I lived in America now, with a family. I talked to my grandparents some, but not often. We sadly had fallen apart.
In the summer of 2019, my grandpa was in a pretty critical condition. My grandma, his wife of 53 years, had died 5 months earlier. He was bedridden when I went back home for grandma’s funeral.
I was so sad not to see grandma for the last time, but saw that one silver lining that I got to spend so much time with my grandpa during that trip, which was also my last trip to Vietnam. I hadn’t been able to come back since, least of all due to Covid.
On June 9, 2019, my grandpa died, on a hospital bed, surrounded by most of his family, children and grandchildren. But not me, nor my husband or daughter, his sole great grandchild.
On June 9, 2019, my father-in-law went into a coma. Yes, it was the same day.
I chose to stay in America because there was no way I could drive back to my home which was 2 hours away to get my passport in time to make a trip half-way around the globe in less than 24 hours happen. I was gonna miss that funeral anyway.
So, I wrote his eulogy. I grieved in private. And I quickly put my grief aside. I had other things to do. Like, taking care of the living.
I stayed with my father in law (still in a coma), my mother in law, my sister in law, her husband, and of course, my own. We grieved together as a unit, not knowing when or if my father-in-law was ever gonna wake up.
He did, after 11 long days, thank goodness.
But, The Guilt of Not Returning to Grandpa’s Funeral. That, had never left me.
How grief works
Grief is a strange thing. Like a piece of skin you forgot you had. An extra mole perhaps. It’s always there. It doesn’t usually hurt. But you look in the mirror one day, polished it, and you saw the mole clearer than ever.
There was a reason I became an insomniac shortly after my grandpa died. For 8 months straight, no doctor or expert in the field could explain the strange sequencing of my insomnia. They tried to attribute it to my Graves’ Disease (elevated level of Thyroids), but that doesn’t sit right with me because I had had it since Norah was born.
Nobody in my team was able to understand my exaggerated reaction to the intern’s parents’ death. It was sad, so extremely fucking sad - they all acknowledged. But Linh - you got a family to love and a company to run and a home to call yours. Isn’t this strange piece of news disproportionately affecting your whole world?
To which, I of course have no answers.
We are living in such a strange time. Over here in America, most people are pretending that the pandemic is basically over. Masks off everywhere, policy is in place to put the economy “back on track”. Everyone’s anxious to “return to normal”.
In Vietnam, with still only 30+ cases of deaths, the government did the opposite (like they have always been notoriously known for since the beginning). They tightened the restriction even further. Prospects of me returning home to Vietnam any time soon is slim to none.
In India, the circumstance, as everybody knows, is dire. People, to direct-quote from my VP of Sales Utsav, who’s Indian, “are dropping like flies”. Everyone knows multiple people who died. This second wave around, you know the exact names and ages of the people who died. There’s no oxygen tanks or hospital beds left. They cannot cremate people fast enough.
I don’t think as human beings, our brain is wired to register this kind of collective trauma this quickly in such a short amount of time. Living in fear everyday is something we worked so hard to avoid in order to evolve as human beings.
Years and years and years and years ago, the Human Race dealt with 2 things and 2 things only (that stopped them from becoming invincible): Diseases and the Weather.
Years and years and years and years later, we can now send people to Mars and invent decentralized currency, but cannot save our own fellow humans, because of, you guess it, Diseases and The Weather.
It is strange af.
There’s no moving on
Grief will lessen over time - but it will never leave you. Hence, there’s no moving on. There’s only moving forward.
I don’t really have a happy ending to this story, or any ending to be honest. I wrote this story for me, for the intern whose parents died (and will have to live with generational trauma and grief for the rest of her life), and for anyone who’s still struggling to navigate life through grief. It is messy and not easy. But everyone, absolutely everyone, is going through it.
So, check on your people. Be gentle to strangers. They may seem fine. Maybe not. We are all humans.
And, be kind to yourself. Cut yourself some slack. Do things that make you happy.
Life is too short.
I read this on Twitter the other day and could not agree more: “Life is way less stressful when you singularly focus on the long term instead of the short term.”
Till next time, thanks for taking the time of your day to read a piece of my mind.
