t/w: grief, death, life

There’s this one image from 2011 I go back often to. It’s a photo of my brother, my father and me exchanging sunglasses. We really had a whole selection of weird-looking onces back then. In fact, I remember sending a collection of horrendous looking photos of me in different pairs of shades to an ex of mine. This was around the time Embark, Arugam-bay and Live and Kickin were picking up as brands. Everyone who liked street dogs or hated them started wearing tshirts with dog-relavant quotes on them.

By 2011 I had already realized that I’m not going to do so great in my A Levels. I was already made fun of in class for crossing my legs too often cause it was considered feminine. I was in some weird situationship with someone who liked me more than I liked them. I had read Looking for Alaska and fallen in love with John Green’s writing. I’ve started wearing more than one wrist band in one hand. I have tried starting my first acoustic band and failed. I had just exceeded 1000 friends on facebook. My dad had come back from his second or third try of working in the Middle East and earning some money. We’ve finally completed building our house after 14 years or so.

My parents built the house in parts. For years it was just a living room, bed room and a kitchen with an outdoor toilet. My grandparents lived on the same land in a house next to us. In 2001 during Chandrika Kumaratunga’s presidency there were power blackouts and electricity rationing. When I think of version 1 of the house, I remember a lot of candle light and radio. Radio cause you could buy those battery operated radios to keep you entertained until the power comes back. There was a veralu (ceylon olive) tree in the garden. We had it for the longest time until my uncle took over that part of the land and sold it to someone else. Veralu has a distinctively tangy, sour, and slightly bitter flavor when raw, which turns sweeter when fully ripe. My favorite way to consume veralu was as veralu achcharu (pickle). Aththamma would boil and soak them in chili, sugar, salt and vinegar. My father used to ride a motorcycle back then. For someone’s birthday he would buy naan, a full roasted chicken and a salad, keep it in his jacket and bring it home. One fine day close to Vesak, he accidentally ate paappa (a paste made from flour and water used to make lanterns) thinking it’s a curry.

Aatha used to ride a Chaly. It is a mini bike that is close to a scooter. He has a DIY basket attached to the front of it so he could put things in. At some point they stopped making wheels for the model he owned. He had them replaced with tuk tuk tires. Good thing is he could keep using the scooter, the bad thing was that he couldn’t do any sudden turns cause the tires were too thick. He wanted me to be an engineer before my parents did. He once made his own TV antenna and was really proud of it. But he didn’t know how to set up the channels. I have spent hours in his bedroom searching through frequencies to set it up the way he wanted it to be; 1 for Rupavahini, 2 for ITN, 3 for Channel Eye and 4 for Sirasa. Years later I bought him a Batapola antenna which rotates with the press of a button. He kept a big wooden box of random electrical things to give to me once I become an Engineer. I did become an engineer at some point but I never received that box in the end. When I went to his funeral last year I looked for it but couldn’t find it.

I got my reading habit from him, though. He used to run a small home-based library called Sumaga Pusthakalaya. By the time I started reading more of his books he had stopped lending books. But I was lucky enough to get access to a whole cabinet of old sinhala novels. I read translations of Alexandre Dumas, Maxim Gorky, and Dostoevsky, and talked to him about them over Marie biscuits and plain tea. Aththamma would make tea for me at least two times a day, this is excluding the morning tea I’d have with my parents; one at 11 am and one around 3.30 or 4 pm. Plain tea always came with biscuits, it was almost sacrilegious to have it without them. I’d easily finish half a packet of Munchee chocolate cream biscuits or Tikiri marie. Every now and then, in the middle of those novels, I’d stumble onto a paragraph or two with a sexual undertone and find myself returning to it more than once.

For version 2 of the house, we went from varnished red floors to tiles. But we could only afford to tile the living room, dining room, the front entrance and the bathroom. Our mason convinced my parents to buy tiles from warehouse rejects. But cheaper tiles meant uneven colors. So our living room and dining room ended up with a bunch of odd tiles; some looked artsy and edgy, others were vividly different. When I was 10 I told Aatha and Aththamma I’d build them a palace when I grew up. At that age it didn’t feel like an impossible thing to promise. They both passed away in hospitals, without me beside them. In the last three years of Aththamma’s life, whenever I called her my voice would break because I knew how little time I had left with her. She wasn’t even that sick, but I knew. My voice never broke when I spoke to my brother; not even during the last call. I didn’t know how little time I had with him.

I’ve wasted an incredible amount of my life being straight. There’s grief from that too. The friends and cousins I can no longer relate to but still are friends with me on facebook, The whole Royal college, every friend of mine that’s married with kids. I wasn’t prepared to be this lonely after coming out. It gets better though. You find your people. Life makes sense.

I wonder if to be old is to know more dead people. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not know any. There’s nothing reflective about this post. Not everything is a lesson. Sometimes things happen and then you die. Or sometimes things happen and then you live. But some days I only think about that photo from 2011; my brother, my father, me, passing sunglasses back and forth, grinning at how stupid we looked.

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I remember watching Aftersun in 2022 and there was this one quote that really resonated with me, In 2023 when I turned 30 I posted it on my stories;

The film follows 11-year-old Sophie and her 30-year-old father Calum as they spend a summer vacation at a Turkish resort in the 1990s. Calum is a loving and attentive father, but there are subtle signs that he is struggling with inner turmoil and mental health issues. Despite his efforts to give Sophie a fun and carefree holiday—swimming, dancing, and having heartfelt conversations—there are glimpses of his loneliness and emotional pain beneath the surface. Did I feel the same way as Calum back then? Yes. We probably weren’t going through the same things but 2023 was my first year in the most intense period of grief in my life.

I think everyone secretly (or publicly) have a few things they want to achieve by 30. Common things include running a marathon, travelling solo, getting back to reading, moving countries etc. But nobody really makes a list of things they want to lose by 30 except probably the people who are trying to lose weight or battling cancer. So when you lose your brother by the time you turn 30, that doesn’t fit neatly into any checklists. I think grief really alters the way you perceive time and the future. While others count the milestones they want to reach, you count the things that will never happen, the things that were never said and the music that won’t be made.

My most upvoted post on reddit (when I was stupid enough to create an account with my own name) is from 6 years ago on r/askphilosophy, where I asked people about the Philosophy of Keiji Nishitani. I was getting tired of White Philosophers and their attachment to individualism. I needed something that talks about collectivism, interconnectedness and relational being. From then to now, I have tried reading some snippets of “Religion and Nothingness” and the idea of Mahayana Buddhist term Sunyata. It’s fun to say “each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself” at a party, but what does it really mean?

I think half the reason why the “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Absurdism gained popularity was Camus’s face. I’ve seen multiple articles calling him “terrifically good-looking”. While that’s a bit far-fetched, I do see the appeal. There’s something sexy about this man telling you that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” while smoking a cigarette, and not giving a damn about his tuberculosis. But does the revolt against the meaninglessness of life need to be done in solitude?

Sunyata is nothingness. But this isn’t the nothingness in the West that’s seen as negation - a void where something should be, an emptiness that needs filling. But it is instead an absolute nothingness. For anything to exist, there must be an absolute nothingness from which it arises and which it passes into, otherwise change would be impossible since everything would already exist and would remain as it is, It’s the ground of all being. Śūnyatā, isn’t about erasing existence but recognizing that everything exists through its relations to everything else. Nothing stands alone, not even you. And in that interdependence, there is a kind of fullness. The nothingness is not the end of meaning—it’s where meaning begins.

Nishitani quotes an old proverb, “Fire does not burn itself. Water does not wash itself. A sword cannot cut itself.” In Western metaphysics, you might say: “Fire is that which burns.” But if burning is its essence, why can’t fire burn itself? Fire’s essence can’t be understood in isolation. Fire can only be fire through its relation to other things—it burns outside itself, not within. I’m not at all well-versed in Philosophy, but from the bits and pieces I’ve read this means that the core of our existence depends on what we are not. The people we love become part of us through their absence. Loss doesn’t leave us as neatly as Western philosophies of individualism suggests. You don’t simply “move on” or “find closure” or go through “five stages of grief” - because the person you lost isn’t an object you leave behind. Their non-being folds into your being. You carry them, not as a weight, but as a condition of your own existence.

And this interconnectedness extends beyond grief. If everything exists through its relationship to everything else, then fundamentally, no one is truly independent or self-contained. We should count on each other - not just for emotional support, but for survival, safety, and freedom. So freedom isn’t the absence of obligation; it’s recognizing that we are already intertwined. True liberation comes from embracing this mutual dependence, where our well-being is bound up with the well-being of others. If you are yourself because of what you are not, then your freedom depends on the freedom of those around you. There’s no escaping the relational web we all inhabit - and within that web lies the potential for collective care and collective liberation. There was never a separate “you” in the first place.

And maybe the point was never about pushing the boulder uphill- but about realizing that the hill itself is the problem. If the hill is the overarching systems of power (like Capitalism, Patriarchy, Heteronormativity etc.) and the State, the answer isn’t to endlessly labor under its weight. It’s to dismantle the hill altogether. Nothingness suggests that systems of power only exist through their relations - through what they are not. If the structures that oppress us depend on these relational boundaries, then freedom lies in breaking them down, not merely surviving within them.

I didn’t expect this post to be this philosophical. Maybe Keiji Nishitani didn’t mean any of these. But I now know for sure that an individual’s experience of solitary confrontation with the absurd isn’t how I want to look at the world and life anymore. And collective care isn’t just an act of kindness, but a radical reorientation of how we understand ‘being’ itself. I’ve recently been blessed to have found a small group of people who are close to my heart. Queer friendships and relationships that make me feel important, loved and perceived is something I’ve been struggling to find and nurture, and I’m glad to have found a few. I have felt so much queer joy in the past few years, and it feels magical to be around people who let me be my authentic self. This is the best I’ve felt in my thirties. I hope my dear friends and I would get to shovel a hill or two in the years to come. And that we’ll hold each other throughout the pushing of our own boulders.

I end this post with a poem a dear friend recited to me on my birthday, by Gayle Brandeis. It brought me solace, I hope it would for you too.

Love,
Nisal

My brother would have been 26 today. Do people really stop aging when they die? Two years in twenties don’t make a substantial change in your memory. But it’s going to be strange to think of him if I make it to forties. Will he still be twenty-four in my memory? Or will I anticipate how he’d look/be like if he was in his thirties?

As time passes by, I’ve been finding myself wanting to remember more and more than to forget. When somebody passes away, the number of memories you have with them becomes finite. Your own capacity to remember is finite, too. The real struggle is to keep these finite memories in the finite capacity of your brain as you keep making more and more memories with other people/things. If I didn’t have the voice recordings of my brother singing, will I still remember his voice? The recollection of episodic memory is much harder when it comes to voice. This could be an evolutionary adaptation. For pattern recognition, the face of a saber-toothed tiger and a generic growl was probably enough. There’s nothing to dissect there. Or maybe we’re just not paying enough attention to things that deserve more attention.

While it is true that shared rituals and support systems make the process of grieving easier, grief also has core elements of a very personal journey. The necessity of community in grief is to be with a person in their individual and unique journey, not to dictate or rush the healing process. The duality of grief is this, the aspects of community and oneself. Also, the tension between the ache of absence and the warmth of remembrance, to miss or to remember.

All grief becomes disenfranchised over time. - Kenneth Doka

As the world moves on and the initial wave of sympathy subsides, even the most profound losses can become invisible to others, leaving those still grieving to feel unseen in a world that seems to have moved on, forgetting that healing from loss doesn’t follow a universal timeline. As the months pass by, I keep realizing how true this is when it comes to my grief and actually specially my mom’s. It is unfortunate how society has expectations on who can grieve and when. The validation of loss wanes over time, making the grief become disenfranchised.

The importance of remembrances of someone who has passed is often talked about, but not so much about the importance of the absence of the said person. I like that I have all these photographs, voice messages, song covers or just objects he collected that I can pivot on when it comes to remembering him, but also the tangible presence of his absence is almost divine.

This absence manifests in unexpected ways - the WhatsApp contact that no longer appears on your contact list, the Instagram feed that no longer updates, your airport pick-up driver being a different person. It’s in these moments of stark awareness that the full weight of loss truly settles in, yet paradoxically, it’s also where a profound connection to the departed emerges. In navigating this absence, we discover new dimensions of our relationship with them, ones that continue to evolve even after they’re gone.

A few years back, someone I met on tinder had lymph node inflammation and was hospitalized. I went to the ward to see her since the first date went well. Turns out her mom was in town to see her so I had to introduce myself as Jyotsna’s friend’s friend; from college. It was obviously awkward.

There were quite a bit of things that we left hanging on the first date so I was hoping to talk to her alone and the last thing I expected was to be in the ward with her mom sitting next to me. After all the small talk she asked if I could sing for her. Without much thinking I said, “not unless you’re dying” I realized that the grown-ups are not used to death jokes like us millennials from the howling noise her mom made. I apologized.

My brother passed away on the labor day of 2022 He was only 24 and I tried hard to radicalize him in his twenties, sending him videos and readings related to socialism. He did eventually become an anti-capitalist as he started working and realized he no longer had time for his art. (He was also a producer) In early 2022 Sri Lanka started facing the worst ever economic crisis. The rate of inflation rose to 50% a year. The people eventually took over the streets forcing the president to resign. The Protesters setup this make shift village called “Gota Go Gama” in front of the presidential secretariat. Now this was a good nudge to my brother. He went to work during the day, waited in the patrol queue in the evenings and went to the protests at night. An Aedes aegypti decided to bite him one of these days and he had no idea he had dengue until very late.

Despite having the elements of the left, Gota Go Gama wasn’t a leftist protest village. (which I believe was a part of the reason for its eventual failure but that is an article for another day, anti-capitalism without a proposed alternative political-economical ideology can only take you so far) I still like to believe that my brother died a comrade, adopting the cause of people. A few hundred people showed up for his funeral. We sang “Handa Allanna Aasa Gamana” (Yearning to catch the moon) at the crematorium. Everybody cried. That’s the most emotional I have felt singing a song in my life. We finished the rituals on 8th, 7 days after his death. On 9th the state attacked the protest village.

Being the first generation of death jokes and making memes about wanting to die hasn’t made millennials any better in grief or understanding people who are grieving. Funerals are pretty compared to deaths. When the rituals finish and the crowd slowly leaves, that’s when it hits you; a person you love no longer exists. People seem to think that grief is this linear process and does a decent job in the beginning. Again, this is mostly my experience because there were so many instances where I had to drag my mom away from a distant relative cause they kept asking her about the details of the death. People will say the most hurtful things at a funeral without even realizing it.

Grief is a roller coaster, not a mountain climb. It does not progress from bad to the better. It surges and falls, abates and intensifies, twists and turns. Will it help if the seat-belts were only worn at the beginning of the ride?
I am grateful for the few relationships I could depend on during the falls and twists mid-way, but I also think about the influx of support that I had in the beginning and slowly ceased. I wonder if I would be in a better place with my grief if that was consistent.

Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us. - Irvin D. Yalom

There’s something so profound about grief. But for it to be cathartic and releasing it needs to be communal. I don’t think many people are familiar with death. People witness death, of course. But not many dissect and analyze it enough to a point that they can comprehend it. This failure to acquire the comprehension of death makes the majority of people awkward during the times of death and post-death.

If we can joke about death, we can talk about death. We have it easier now since the humor has already surpassed the morbidity of death. As we discuss and analyze this intellectually apparent phenomenon, death; perhaps it would help us shift from being sympathetic to being more empathetic towards people. Instilling empathy is a necessary step in moving past political apathy, especially at a time where multiple genocides are happening in the world right now at Palestine, Sudan and Congo. As you wait for the year to end as if there’s going to be a breakthrough in 2024, let this be it. Talk to someone about death on New Year’s Eve. Embrace mortality before its inevitable occurrence.

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