Bargaining…
When you have immense love to offer and no one to take it, it manifests as grief. Grief, they say is just love with no place to go.
When I first read this, it hit me hard. I had a lump down my throat, may be because I could deeply relate with it. Kubler Ross described the five stages of grief as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. One doesn’t necessarily go through each one of those stages or in any particular order as mentioned. Personally, I go from a little bit of anger to maybe a bit of bargaining to a quick acceptance. When life has kicked you down a lot, you grow to find acceptance quickly too.
I haven’t attended a lot of funerals, but I have seen people grieve a lot. I have seen mom and dad grieve, my cousins grieve, friends grieve, my sis in law grieve, my neighbors grieve. You will almost never find me breaking down. Honestly, I almost never feel anything. It is as though my faucet of emotions get turned off. To people who do not understand, I could come across as an emotionless expressionless robot. The only time I remember crying was when my paternal grandmother died. Probably, also the only time dad cried.
Instead, I grieve the living more. I grieve friendship breaks and relationships gone sour. I live all the five stages in a long drawn out fashion and hop from bargaining to sadness to back to bargaining mixed with anger to finally acceptance. There can’t be bargaining without a bit of denial, I suppose. It takes me months to accept that a one sided futile effort cannot build bridges over the rotting pillars of a relationship. I then finally come to my senses and learn to let go.
Even though I belong to a profession that sees a lot of morbidity and mortality, I still to this day bargain with diagnoses. You want the best diagnosis amongst the worst possible and the least suffering for your near and dear ones. But, finally you grow to accept it.
In friendships when you bargain, I suppose you keep giving people the benefit of doubt. You make excuses for their ill behavior and advocate for them at your own cost. As a little kid when you have given your best and everything to people or relationships and when it doesn’t get reciprocated, in all your naivety you grieve. You seldom realize when you are that young that it takes two to make a friendship work and you have been fixing just one half of the equation all along. Yourself!
Notice the couples who break up. I am not talking of the ones who are forced to break up under unfortunate circumstances. In India that unfortunate entity is mostly your own family because stupidity trumps everything else here. I am speaking of the ones where one leaves the other for someone else and the bereft one keeps grieving the loss of their partner who cares diddly squat about him/her. They don’t realize for a long time that they are bargaining and trying to fix just one side of the equation. They are trying to force reciprocation of love where none exists.
There is still a kid in me that wants my friendships and relationships to be fairytales. Ones that transcend beyond the human fallacies of ego and envy. I want it to start off young and remain until we are both ripe old. Ones that don’t breathe their last well before it is time.
However, just like people, friendships and relationships have a shelf life too. It is only the exceptional ones that last a lifetime and continue to inspire beyond their years on Earth. The ones which poems and fairytales get written about.
It is possible that I was wrong about grief all along. Maybe, grief is not love not reciprocated. It is holding on to love not reciprocated and wishing it were different. When you grow older, you learn to grieve your losses less. You go from a little bit of anger to a lot of acceptance.
Because, you are not naive anymore and you learn that one can only wish for utopia under a shooting star.
