A little about the movie…
The movie starts and ends in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Kochi where an elderly man and a fiercely independent young woman are trying to cope with the near-fatal accidents of their spouses. Shiv has been in and out of the hospital for the last eight months trying to care for his wife who has been comatose for the last eight months, unable to let her go despite doctors having given up hope of her recovery. And Tara finds herself shattered after the accident of her husband who lies in a coma in a hospital and city that is completely unfamiliar to her. As she grapples to come to terms with the accident, she finds solace in the company of Shiv who seems to get her more than anyone else. Throughout the movie, through their shared and individual experiences, you see the two characters come face-to-face with universal yet uncomfortable truths around grief and loss of a loved one. Though the subject of the movie is grim, the storyline itself is very real and relatable.
And here are a few realizations that I had after watching the movie.
We are never fully prepared for the loss of a loved one.
No matter how much we dress-rehearse the death of a loved one (and I’m afraid we all do think about it more often than we want to agree), we can never be fully prepared. When it happens, it will still shatter us, and the pain and grief that follows is inescapable. The reality of living and loving.
‘Be positive’ or ‘things will get better’ aren’t comforting to someone in grief.
Supporting a friend or family member or anyone else who is grieving isn’t easy. Often we don’t know what to say or how to act. But asking them to stay positive or assuring them that things will get better isn’t the best kind of consolation. What most of us need when we grieve is for people to just be there for us, to stand in that grief with us, to extend some help. And standing in their grief with them is far more difficult than sharing pieces of advice. The best we can do is to stay there with them and acknowledge their pain.
It’s okay to not just grieve the death of a loved one but also the loss of your own normal life.
When someone close to us passes away, we aren’t just losing that person but also the life that we shared with them that was once our normal. So it’s okay for us to grieve the loss of our normal life. It isn’t mean or selfish. It is natural. Because in that situation, you have to not only come to terms with the loss of someone who meant the world to you but also reconstruct your life back without them in it, and you have no idea what that will even look like.
The stages of grieving aren’t exactly linear.
While we grieve, we go through five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But this isn’t necessarily a clean linear movement from one stage to another where acceptance can be seen as the end destination or moving on as we call it. But grieving will be a back and forth through these stages and can show up in different ways for different people.
How much of what we do is for us and how much is for them?
Shiv is unable to let his wife be taken off a ventilator even though the doctor insists that she is in much more pain living like this. But Shiv ends up mortgaging his house and spending every bit of his money to keep her alive. The question is, how much of his need to keep her alive is his own, and how much of it could actually have been her desire to live? And bringing the focus on ourselves, how much of our prayers for a bed-ridden relative’s longevity is for them, and how much is it for ourselves? And if it is for ourselves, is that a selfish thing to do? Or, is the choice to pull the plug on a loved one more selfish? Maybe both are aren’t selfish, after all…
The discomfort of making someone else’s life-changing decisions for them.
Discussing death or comatose situations is not a usual dinner table conversation. For most of us, it is a discussion we never have until we may be faced with that situation and wonder if we should have had that conversation. Would he have preferred to undergo surgery with great risks but a high success rate or would he have preferred to wait it out? Would survival matter to her or her quality of life?
In conclusion…
In the end, Shiv and Tara make their choices and wait it out. And waiting it out is all they can do. And all we can do too. Grief is universal. And the fear of losing loved ones is universal too. Regardless of how we choose to express it, we all feel it. And that’s the way of life.
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