On grief and other maladies
By: Sanket Mishra
Tags: Loss, 2020, Grief, Creative Non Fiction, Cancer Survival

What does grief feel like to you? On yet another day when browsing Twitter has taken over me and I sit possessed, my fingers forcing my timeline to refresh every second, I see that the Black Panther star has died. He had colon cancer. In a world where thousands are dying every day, death has lost its power. Yet the initial passing sorrow I feel starts to build as I scroll down and down into the depths of the social media platform.

Cancer lives in me rent-free but not in a form that shows up on test scans. It lies in wait like a sleeper cell for a spot in my mouth which looks different or swelling in my throat. Then it flares up in my thoughts and the flashbacks of those days start running in my head. The bloody mouth, the slurred speech, the months of pain are not just memories anymore. A badly made montage of the worst year of my life shifts inside me taking all my internal organs for a roller coaster ride. One moment they are in free fall, another they lie tied up at my lower abdomen with a thick rope of hope. The tests come back negative. The swelling is just the garden variety common cold. The spot in the mouth was just pepper.

I had never known Chadwick Boseman as I know him today scrolling mindlessly through the various twitter posts about him. As he crossed his arms in front of his chest and grunted “Wakanda Forever” he was fighting disease. He was kind and humble. He housed representation in his coattails and carried arguments for all of us without saying a lot of words. Thousands had posted selfies, videos of him being a gentleman acceding to requests when he could have denied. Celebrities of every industry wrote glowing tributes to the man behind the black figure-hugging leotard panther skin. My insides were bunched up inside me. A familiar feeling.

Cancer is a wily old devil. It adapts. Even in its absence and clear margins, it creates a presence. When the common cold and last night’s dinner fail to trigger the response it feeds off, it attaches itself to emotions. You sit in a rented flat and talk with your partner about the house you intend to buy. You are tallying the savings you have when something does not add up. Fear rises in you. What if you cannot afford the house? Cancer smells the fear and as if it is smelling salt, it awakes. Soon you have put down the curtains and are marinating in the darkness with your malignant thoughts.

I keep reading the tributes for Chadwick. I see all the pictures. He has kind eyes. Had. His eyes remind me of Irrfan Khan. As if Kishore Kumar has sung in the movie Safar for their eyes “Jeevan se bhari teri aakhen, majboor kare jeene ke liye” (Your eyes, full of life, force me to live life). Irrfan and I got our diagnosis of cancer around the same time. As I lay recovering from the effects of an invasive surgery Irrfan was fighting a rare form of cancer. Across the barrier of class, countries and being strangers, we fought our battles together. That is what I had convinced myself.

Cancer does not fight you. You are too tiny, too meaningless, too inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The only enemy of Cancer is time. You are just caught in the crossfire. As the clock turns, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day tiny battles ensue between these two. Make no mistakes the race is loaded heavily in favour of Cancer. But time gives you ramparts, bunkers and camouflages. You take a deep breath, plunge yourself headfirst and hope you will hang on as the storms blow over.

Like Boseman, Irrfan died. The bunkers of normalcy I had built upon my test reports and his positive words collapsed. The ghost of Cancer was back. It was feasting on my grief. Invisible white patches cover my mouth every time I hear someone die of Cancer. A cloud of grey, rains upon me paranoia and grief. What does grief feel like to me? My throat tightens, my insides lie at my lower abdomen tied up with a thick rope and everything is tinted with the smell of hopelessness. I hope it treats you better.