Weeknotes - 2025-W30
A bird’s nest right outside our balcony. FIL would’ve enjoyed this thoroughly.
At the start of the week - Prasanna and I went to Little Italy, Besant Nagar for dinner with parents and their friend “J” + J’s daughter. The food is always great there and they’ve managed to keep it standard through the years. By the end of the dinner, the conversation drifted to talking about J’s husband - whom she lost a few years ago. She and her daughter were sharing stories about him and Prasanna added to the conversation with her father’s stories followed by my mother too. To me, it was such a wonderfully soft moment where people were sharing their vulnerabilities with each other.
On the way back, Prasanna and I were talking about how much of grief is kept aside. J kept her face partially hidden when talking about her partner because she was crying through some parts of it. This felt really sad to see because its such an important emotion to her - yet she feels compelled to keep it so hidden.
I wish we can all learn to be more vulnerable to each other. It is often interpreted as a sign of weakness but I believe that when you feel comfortable to bear your vulnerabilities to someone else, you are the strongest person over there.
This week’s gym sessions were great. I was able to deadlift 80KGs. Really humbled by my body through this process. How much of strength it has, and how less I’ve been using it all this time. There is a bit of a niggle in the lower back, but I think that’s just the body adjusting to the process and not really pain of any kind that needs me to stop and re-assess.
I’ve never been one for “breaking the records” or anything like that. I am content in just breaking my own inner limits so the increase of weights every week isn’t a “power grasp” of any kind. It is simply the side effect of showing up.
Truthfully, starting this week’s note was hard. July 24th marks 1 year of my FIL passing away. Its been a hard week, but we’ve made it through.
I can viscerally remember how the situation was like - 1 year ago. The state of mind Prasanna & her mother were in. The state of mind I was in.
In this year, I learned how to sit down with pain. In this case - Prasanna’s pain. I love her very deeply and there was nothing that I could do for her, short of bringing her father back from the dead that would ease her pain.
What do you do when you see the one you love, in so much pain?
What do you do when you can’t do anything about it?
I slowly realized that the only thing I could do - was to show up for her. Hold her through her tears, cry with her, share my stories of uncle with her, walk with her through the darkest path that she’s been on, yet.
So that’s what I did. It wasn’t easy because through all this, she was still in pain. I had to accept that this time, I could do nothing about the pain. And that I’m just going to have to deal with failing on that front. Its not that I didn’t want to put the effort, its that no amount of effort can do anything about it.
This was the lesson that grief taught me - the value of sitting with someone through their pain. I wish I didn’t have to learn my lesson this way by losing a great person in my life - someone who saw me for who I was, and as an equal.
But hey, we don’t get to choose the cards in our hands, we only get to play them. The only truth is that the hand was rigged right from the fucking start.
On 24th, Prasanna and I looked back at her journal entries from early on in her grief and her journal entry on that day. The interesting part was that both entries talk about very similar things but in very different ways. Its that the Prasanna of now has understood how to walk with the pain in her heart. She knows how to carry her grief as part of her existence. I cried reading both entries because it shows, in her own words, the amount of effort she’s had to put in, to pull herself through the darkest patches of existence, to get to where she is.
I feel really proud of her but “pride” doesn’t really capture the full extent of my emotions and really does a disservice because this is not something that she chose upon herself. It was a rigged hand that finally dealt its trump card and threw her entire fucking game off.
Maybe what I’m proud of, is that I got to witness someone win so grandly, from having nothing left in their hand.
Maybe what I’m proud of, is the mammoth effort she put in despite the tears, the pain and the agony, leading her to now, where she stands tall and is saying “right, deal me one more, let’s play”.
For now, we start another week tomorrow. A new set of cards in our hands, also rigged perhaps, but the good part is that we don’t know - so we operate as if the entire world runs in our favour. We hope that the ones we love, will wake up tomorrow and have many more tomorrows where they wake up, and we send each other messages / talk to each other / fight with each other / learn about each other.. but most importantly - have each other.
It’s been a hard week and perhaps the note reflects as such. If I keep the habit up, I’m sure all the weeknotes that have July 24th in it, will be the same way. He was a great man that didn’t deserve to die this soon, unfortunately there is nothing we can do about that. All we can do is attempt to live with a bit of his fire within those of us that he had an impact on. Maybe that’s how they live on in this world - via small actions by a small set of us that would otherwise not do those actions, had we not paused and asked ourselves the question - “What would Raghavan do, had he been here?”.