Introduction

It is now close to 6 years since March 8^th 2014, the day flight MH370 vanished after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board (including my wife). The multi-year, multimillion-dollar search led by Malaysia has yielded little.

At the time of writing, it is unclear where the aircraft and the passengers (remains) are, and what caused the plane to disappear.

I had the opportunity to look back during the last two weeks on some of the key struggles and dilemmas that I (and I presume many others similarly placed) encountered in dealing with loss, particularly in circumstances described as ‘ambiguous loss’.

My family, friends and colleagues have been an integral part of a process of reconciliation and reconstruction and what I share here will be familiar territory. I have written too at different times about it.

This piece has come together as an initial personal narrative that I hoped would help in writing a paper.

It has turned out to be quite long. Take the time. It could be useful.

My context

I am an Indian. Where I come from, life is understood as circular, the cycle of life tightly meshed with the eternal cycle of life and death inherent in all of Nature. So, whether there be a God, a higher Intelligence or the great Leveller, it was understood that there is an order of things that are beyond our tweaking and tinkering, that as rational and sentient beings we will eventually come to a settlement with this, a surrender, if you like, an acceptance that there are mysteries beyond our consciousness and our capacities to fathom, and forces beyond our capacity to master and control.

My encounter with Vipassana reinforced the idea of impermanence of all things, the futility of a quest for certainty, and that craving, and aversion are the source of suffering and sorrow. Through training of the body and mind, it opened the possibility of being equanimous.

Early in life, one of the messages I received was that all good things eventually come to an end. This invariably set off a foreboding, a preparation for the worst, for dark days after the sunny. I became more an observer of the drama of life than active participant—seemingly my way of insulating myself from the pain and hurt that I imagined would inevitably follow. In the process, I curbed the intensity and embrace of the effervescent, joyous, noisy and chaotic exuberance that was around me.

So, it seems I had many layers of self-protection and insulation from potential emotional whiplash or upheavals; a vantage point as an observer unto myself and the world that I could operate from and a philosophical stance that became an excuse for not engaging fully with anything.

However, tragedy and trauma have a way of breaching these defenses and lay bare the hurt, pain and confusion.

Coping with ‘not knowing’

Past or present tense

One of the earliest struggles was with not being able to decide whether to refer to my wife in the past or present tense. So little was known. The information void raised possibilities ranging from passengers possibly being alive ‘somewhere’ to certain death in a crash or some sinister plot.

My family and friends for many months held out hope that as long there is no definitive information about a mishap, there is always the possibility that passengers might be alive. “Where is the evidence (where is the body?)?”, was the repetitive counter to any suggestion that the plane most likely went down with no survivors. Furthermore, many were steadfast in their faith in their Gods and prayer, and the power of miracles.

In the midst of a collective state of ‘denial’ it would have been insensitive / inappropriate to suggest that the plane most likely went down and loved ones on it are lost forever.

While I was personally inclined to believe early on that the plane probably crashed, I lived with the internal dissonance and was vigilant about how I spoke in public and to the media when I referred to my ‘loss’, lest it offend family and friends.

The veneer of normalcy

I lost my father to prolonged illness when I was in my teens. That experience was my primary reference point. At that time, as the only son, and college-going, restoring routines was a priority. This time too I willed myself to get busy in routines, keeping conversations mostly around tasks and activities, and getting immersed in the efforts to track and push Malaysia on the search and investigation. It gave a veneer of normalcy. In embracing the advice to stay strong, I allowed no time to reckon with my own feelings.

The more I became preoccupied with the search for answers regarding the flight, the more it seemed hard to carry on. As I took in the speculations and conspiracies or sought to understand aviation and its technologies, the more incomprehensible the whole situation seemed, and the more inadequate I felt. My state of agitation grew worse. My intellectual acuity slipped and added to my anxieties about my capacity to carry on.

In a prolonged phase of ‘not knowing’, dread takes the place of confronting the inevitable. There was a sense of time standing still, in anticipation. Everything save that which had deadlines to be met, was on hold or postponed—plans, actions, decisions, investments, expenditures, travel, commitments, purchase/disposal. Much like a computer in distress that reboots in ‘safe mode’ and draws upon the bare essentials to function, I allowed myself just the minimum necessary for acceptable levels of functioning.

They say the body ‘knows’ first and has its own tales to tell—of experience acknowledged or ignored, owned up or disowned. Around the fourth month after the incident, acute spasms of my neck and shoulder muscles created huge discomfort in neck movements. This was largely attributed to unacknowledged, accumulated stress and for the first time that I realised that I was suffering emotionally. I had no appetite and had lost weight. My blood sugar levels started climbing. Close to the end of a yoga session I took at my friend’s instance, I wept for long without any apparent trigger. It seemed like tears buried in the body were teased out and later became a torrent. It was time to acknowledge that I felt my partner’s absence acutely and I was hurting. 

The notion of ‘normalcy’ was torn asunder, and I had to search for a ‘new normal’.

Was seeking out a counselor an option?

In the early days, that option was made available. For the first time, I came to know of the existence of grief counsellors. I didn’t avail of counselling services at any time even though some friends did suggest that such counselling might be beneficial.

Why? It had to do with arrogance, ignorance and consequent prejudice. My training in human behaviour led me to superciliously and quite erroneously think I could ‘sort myself out’. I was prejudiced in thinking that since there was ‘nothing wrong with me’, I didn’t need professional help. I believed that my small and intimate circle of family and friends was sufficient—they were there for me when I needed and showed me a way when I felt lost. It didn’t occur to me that this might be tough for people close to me to be supportive, given their feelings towards me, my situation, our relationship, and their struggle to cope with their own feelings of loss. For a trained counsellor, drawing boundaries might have been easier and what was at stake was competence and reputation rather than relationship.

Living through loss and loneliness: Making space for the void

To begin with, my wife’s absence was imperceptible. We were used to her prolonged and sometimes frequent absences due to her travels. As days went by, I joked about her ‘long leave of absence’, more by way of consolation than with any conviction.

While she was physically missing, her presence was felt everywhere—in every chore, every decision, however mundane, every conversation, and every time I took the car out. She ‘leapt out’ of photographs. Now, in her absence, her voice, her choice and counsel spoke loud and clear from memory, ever present and vivid.

We exercised extra care for a while to not disturb things that she may have had a hand in and sought to align what we did with what we believed she would have approved of. This way of living too was part of the ‘safe mode’ that had come to be operative. It felt good to speak of her as living through me, through us, as we stayed faithful to her likes and her ideology.

A lasting companionship, an intimate friend and lover, an able foil for one’s occasional brashness, a collaborator, and much else that I have experienced taken away abruptly left a void that memory could barely attempt to fill. A gnawing loneliness crept in and remained for an extended period.

The reality of absence and the experience of loss—urgent and immediate, palpable and unexpectedly thrust upon me—weighed heavily each day as evenings approached. As each day went by with no clarity or will to shape the days and months that followed, it was easy to slide into a deep well of silence, a deadness rather than the stillness that comes from meditative contemplation. I have come to believe that allowing for and experiencing this phase of incommunicable ache, longing and loneliness is essential. I suspect, in this lies the seeds, the beginnings of a gradual ease one more time, with one’s own company, to be at home with one’s breath, body, mind and spirit in all its imperfections, and the beginnings of a fresh quest.

With the passage of time, memory’s grip weakened. It no longer held sway. I think it came with a recognition that my wife was certainly not coming back, that a life ahead didn’t have to carry forward a sameness, a replication or a continuation of a life lived. To continue as if she was around would be a cop out, an escape, not taking ‘fresh guard’ and starting a fresh innings, borrowing an expression from the game of cricket.

This recognition also meant that I had to now take near exclusive responsibility for some of my choices and decisions. What may have involved discussion, negotiation and compromise with my wife in the past now needed me to deal with only self-imposed hurdles and barriers, hang-ups and bans. In some ways, it was an invitation to approach afresh matters of desire, companionship, work choices and lifestyle. I was at a doorway and not on a springboard. It heightened my aloneness, and I was tentative.

This business of ‘closure’

Perhaps one of the defining features of ‘ambiguous loss’ besides ‘physical absence and psychological presence’ is the experience of ‘no closure’. Indeed, the lack of closure for the families has come up over and over again.

Beyond grief, the need for answers

For me the lack of closure lay in the festering, unresolved puzzle about what really happened to the plane and its passengers, and the ongoing search for the plane. Related to this was the issue of litigation for fair compensation and a legal process that I hoped might bring forth facts, records, and documents to the public, render justice and fix accountability, even costs.

For the longest time, a part of me remained unswerving, committed to following any and every development in the search and investigation. I understood some of it and didn’t quite follow much of the details, the technical stuff. But I was obsessed. There was always the possibility of a recurrence if we didn’t know what issues to fix. The mind seized of a problem or a puzzle doesn’t rest. This pre-occupation affected the capacity to focus on other aspects of life, and to envisage a future.

As indicated earlier, I had from early on come to a conclusion that the plane and its passengers must have met a catastrophic end, or in any case, a tragic end. Being one of the spokespersons for the families required that I put aside my own conclusions and remain a voice of the majority; give voice to their suffering, hopes and expectations. Many remained hopeful of a magical phone call announcing that all was well, and families will be reunited.

It wasn’t just fond hope that rendered early closure difficult. Different cultures deal with issues of life and death, the ceremonies tied to them, the processes of celebration and mourning and the treatment / disposal of the living and the lifeless differently. It appears that to speak of a family member in the past tense without being certain was taboo. So, there were sensitivities around embracing closure. So, closure in effect required navigating the line between what I was personally inclined to do and what my role required. It became clear too that mourning is a communal process and personal closure without a collective reconciliation with feelings of hopes, fears and futility is fraught, incomplete.

I also see now that a cognitive/intellectual understanding or acceptance of a permanent loss has to be matched by an emotional settlement with the grief, the distress, despair, loneliness and even helplessness. This is where inner work is critical and the courage to plumb the depths of what seems like a bottomless well of desolation when (not if) needed.

I found it useful to not pay heed to overt and subtle calls to ‘snap out of it’ and ‘move on’, not surrendering myself to a timeline from anyone. I was in the middle of a momentous struggle to align my head and heart, and a desperate attempt to infuse fresh meaning into existence and no exhortation from the outside to hasten could have any effect.

What had to give?

I reached a point where I had to make peace with the prospect of ‘not knowing’ forever and refocusing my priorities from the search and investigation to other things. There were three elements to this: First, I had to reconcile with the knowledge that our science and technology may not yet be advanced enough to locate / retrieve the missing plane. Second, given my suspicions about wrong-doing and cover-ups from very early on, I had to give up my expectations that accountability will be fixed, and justice will be done. This was tough. Third, and most important, I had to assure myself that I had done all that I could in pursuing the truth with the means I could command, and the opportunities presented. I realised that this is a judgment that I alone can and should make. Guilt is an unforgiving squatter, a heavy burden that I could ill-afford to allow space for and carry along. It took me the longest time to come to a determination that it is time now for me to let go of my obsession with finding answers.

I came to the conclusion that closure is a personal choice. A reasoned choice based on time that had elapsed since the incident (technically declared an ‘accident’) and all the information and plausible hypotheses on offer. My wife was not coming back. Wherever she met her end, whether land or water, she became one with Nature, the eternal source and sink of all life. For myself, I did not need to retrieve her lifeless remains to prove anything or appease anyone. 

I made that choice of closure.

Every once in a while, recollecting that a large aircraft remains missing with 239 on board unaccounted leaves me incredulous, unnerved, suddenly weak and deeply sad.

There are times when on a flight, I imagine the flight that went missing, wonder what it might have been for those who were still airborne—did everyone slide into a hypoxic unconsciousness never to wake up, or was there something malevolent, violent, catastrophic? It is scary and uncomfortable.

Moving on

I had to reckon with accumulated fatigue first. I had no vision of a life ahead; the preoccupations with the search had loomed large in my mind for a long time—it was justifiable and in a way was a source of sanity and evidence of a mind that remained active and alert. As time passed, it had become convenient to stay in this zone, a pretext to not confront the question of what next, what lies ahead.

I now had made a conscious choice to let go—to free myself. The cloak of melancholia lifted. Not all things from the past that I was involved in or actively pursued held my interest anymore. I was afraid to look too far ahead, knowing life is fickle and assuming one’s longevity is to cast aside all that I had learnt in recent years. I was a bit more willing to embrace changes to my life and lifestyle.

I haven’t divined a life mission and perhaps never will. I could have made passenger safety and architecting an international alliance to promote passenger welfare a personal priority having most recently emerged from my own encounter with the civil aviation sector. The ask seems too big. However, I do see a role that I might play someday to make it happen.

I am more open to new relationships, deepening old ones and letting go all expectations from some. I have many more friends and well-wishers today, many of whom I have never met. I have felt my life to be worthwhile when I have received the warmth, care and love from people around me, who included me in their scheme of things. I have felt good when I could simply listen to someone who reached out. I have felt blessed when people made time and space for me and received whatever the mood of day brought to the moment. Sometime ago, I wrote that perhaps time is not the healer, love is. I believe so.

I feel that for now it is better to feel alone in a crowd than be alone, to seek the company of others than live only in the company of my own thoughts.  

After a lifetime of indifference towards myself, I now look forward to my tri-weekly workouts to restore a level of fitness. I resumed my vocal music lessons after a gap of many decades. I rediscovered my passion for writing. Writing was in fact my way to find words to describe my context and the inner landscape. I am convinced that having an avenue for self-expression, be it writing prose or poetry, music, dance, art, is critical to accessing the deeper recesses of our mind and heart.

I have rediscovered my appetite for reading after more than five years with one significant difference: this time around, I am immersed in reading fiction. Fiction perhaps connects me to the variety, vitality and exuberance that abounds in life in ways that non-fiction can barely manage. Today, I find non-fiction dreary, tedious and unexciting; a dramatic shift from the time when I only read non-fiction—conceptual, abstract, theoretical—products from the knowledge industry. This has implications for my career, that I need to think through.

As I look back, I feel re-affirmed in my understanding of the self as strong and vulnerable, fair, compassionate and resilient.

Parting reflections