The Unlived Life

A thread of thoughts around death, grief, friendships, aging and living.

Hi,

What you are about to read is something I’ve been trying to write for months now. It is a long and deeply personal essay.

I almost never got to writing it, because I always thought I wouldn’t be able to do justice to it. I wanted it to be “perfect”. There was this immense burden to get it “right”. Eventually, I decided to just let it fly. I’ll publish it regardless of the condition it is in.

I’ve tried to collect many threads of non-linear thoughts into one place. It is a story about death, about grief, about growing older and what it means to live.

(A small warning: This posts contains sensitive discussions around suicide, death and mental health.)

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I. 

Every few days, my friend AA tells me he wants to kill himself. 

I wish this was a dark joke. 

He is serious. 

We aren’t laughing. 

He can only perceive pain and misery. His life is unbearable.

He seems to have set a deadline for himself. If his life doesn’t get better by that date, he’ll go ahead with this action. 

It hasn’t happened yet, because he imagines his funeral and considers the reactions of his loved ones. 

Whenever I see these kinds of messages from my friend, I am at once heartbroken and weirdly enough—I’m also glad. 

I’m glad that he continues to communicate with us (his friends). I’m glad he continues to show trust in us. I’m glad that he hasn’t isolated himself. To me it is a sign that he wants to live. 

But, I’m saddened by my own helplessness. I think about his funeral too. Sometimes, I wake up expecting to receive a call about an untimely death. 

I also think about how I’m on the path of another failure. 

II. 

It is May 18, 2021. 

I’m about to finish the final semester of law school. The last set of exams starts soon. 

The 2nd wave of CoVID has frightened me and my family. We aren’t going anywhere. The fear of the disease is still ever-present. We want to be safe. Specifically, we want my grandad to be safe. 

I couldn’t think about the end of my student life, and I never had the chance to come to terms with it either. 

My dad’s phone starts ringing really loudly early in the morning. It is that annoying default ringtone of iPhone. I’m a light sleeper, and I wake up immediately. I see my dad and mother in panic mode. They are worried. 

Something has happened to my cousin.  

My brother and my father immediately set off towards my uncle’s house nearby. 

I stay back, in case they need anything else. 

Some time later, I receive a call from my brother. 

In a breaking voice he tells me:

“Nirmal, I just carried R’s dead body to the ambulance.” 

R is my first cousin. He is 6 years older than me. 

My bad, he was 6 years older than me. 

He didn’t die due to CoVID. He passed away due to factors which I now know in hindsight could’ve been better handled. 

His age when he died? 

29. 

III. 

Last year, on August 30, I celebrated my 25th birthday. 

It was quiet. I received loving calls and messages from people wishing me. I went to dinner with my family. I published a small video essay I was making. I slept before 12. Kept my phone on silent. 

The age 25, seems to hold a special meaning for many people. It has this aura around it in popular culture. It is a seminal moment where your life changes. You officially enter the mid-twenties and now things will fundamentally alter for you. 

There are two distinct expectations that are randomly put on you as you turn 25. 

I’ve been told at different points by relatives and the community around me that this is the time to ‘settle down’. I’m no longer young, and I’m running out of time to build a stable life. That if I don’t settle down now, I’ll regret it later. 

I’m also told that 20s are the defining decade of  your entire life. In the remaining 5 years, I must ensure that I fulfill my “potential”. I must figure out my shit. I must live the best 5 years possible. 

Entering your late 20s then seems to be this crucial moment of completely figuring out your life ahead of you, AND simultaneously settling down. The age of 25 marks this turning point. 

I don’t share these sentiments. Or at least I’d like to think I don’t care too much about my age. 

There was nothing special when I turned 25. I didn’t have any coming-of-age moment that altered the trajectory of my life. I failed to have any clarity of where I was headed. 

Having said that, I quite liked the number 25. It’s the square of 5. 1/4th of a 100. If you add up all the consecutive single-digit odd numbers, you get 25. The number has a nice symmetric feel to it. Turning 25 was just that: from the time I was born, the earth circled around the sun 25 times and I managed to survive all those 25 times. 

For a long time now, I’ve viewed the 20s to be a very short number. I grew up playing fantasy games and reading fantasy novels. I want to live a long life. I don’t care for the small numbers. I don’t care so much about age-related expectations. Unless they’re at the scale of elves and hobbits. I want to celebrate my 111st birthday like Bilbo Baggins in the beginning of Lord of the Rings. 

I’ll turn 26 in a few months. In comparison to the long life I want, 26 is hardly unique. 

So much of my life is still unlived. 

IV. 

I don’t really have vivid memories from my early childhood days. I know I used to live in a joint family. It was big. My parents, my uncle and aunt, my grandfather, my four cousin sisters, one cousin brother, my elder brother and me. I was the youngest. Pampered the most, especially by my aunt. We all grew up together for a while. 

(there is a bigger joint family, but I don’t want this to be a family-relations CAT question, so we’ll avoid that)

As we grew older, the families went separate ways. We still used to live closeby. 

I vaguely remember looking up to my cousin brother R. When I was a kid, I thought he was cool. He had this calm demeanor around him. He was intelligent and smart. I was told by my parents that I needed to study like him in school. I used to fight him and my elder brother often. I wanted to be included in things that they did. I didn’t want to be left out. I know I wanted to be respected by him and my elder brother. 

This was long back. 

As years went by, I didn’t particularly develop a deep connection with my cousin despite being family. He went to study to become a doctor. I went to a different city to study law. There was very little interaction in those years. Any sense of admiration I may have had as a young kid fizzled away. There was a distance now. He was a stranger. 

I didn’t know what was going on in his life. 

Our conversations were small-talk. We would talk about the weather in Jodhpur. He’d make some remarks about Bangalore. We would discuss some new gadgets and their reviews. 

“How are you?” 

“All good.” 

Maybe things weren’t all good for my cousin. 

V. 

We are in my uncle’s house. Relatives are all around us. 

The men are wearing white and the women are wearing faded sarees. This is a funeral now. A prayer meeting is about to be held. All I can hear are people crying and bawling. 

I’m trying hard to keep my tears at bay. Now is not the time. There are other arrangements to be made. Some running around to do. Make sure we get the death certificate.  Heck, I even have my final semester exams coming up soon. 

My cousin is lying down in the hall, in the center. I’m sitting beside him. 

Across me is my aunt. She’s trying to wake my cousin up. 

She is in denial. She is shaken. Her eyes tell me that she can’t believe what just happened. She requests me to wake R up. 

I can see my cousin too. He’s right there. His eyes are closed. He looks peaceful. 

I can definitely wake him up right? 

Surely all of this is just a bad dream, and once I wake him up, I’ll also get out of this dream and everyone around me will stop suffering. 

Spoiler alert: This isn’t a dream sequence and I couldn’t wake him up. 

His body was there. He wasn’t. 

Only traces of his impermanence exist now—like a newly added photo frame in the home. 

VI. 

I was not as close to my cousin as others in my family. We grew apart. Beyond family gatherings, I didn’t speak to R. We didn’t really share a bond. 

Rationally, then, I shouldn’t be thinking about his passing that often. I shouldn’t have experienced sadness the way I did back then. And yet, I think about this death every few weeks or months. Joan Didion writes in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ that grief can be rather random and disorienting:

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”

Maybe I’m grieving. But I also know that I feel guilty. 

I know how my cousin died. I have an inkling of the ‘why he died’ piece of the puzzle too. I think sometimes that it was a collective failure that led to his death.

A failure which I keep ruminating about, even though I know, no one is really to blame. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It just happened.

Kamran Javadizadeh has this stunning essay about poetry and mourning the death of his sister. I’ve revisited it multiple times now. I think about this line often:

“Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone.”

When I look at our WhatsApp chats, there really isn’t much. No calls. No messages. I hadn’t texted him even once in the last few years. And now I can’t. 

What was I doing?

VII. 

I like kurtas. Apart from t-shirts, I find them to be the most comfortable. 

We wear white kurtas after the death of a family member. I didn’t have any at the time when R passed away. 

After the death of my cousin, I decided to get a few white kurtas tailored. Might as well get a few made. The white kurtas can also double down as some casual wear. They are fashionable. That’s what I thought. 

Since then, I never wore the white kurtas for any ordinary occasions. I’ve only ended up wearing those white kurtas for funerals of some of my older relatives. 

One of those was my aunt. R’s mother. 

She passed away too. 7 months after my cousin’s death. Grieving the death of her son, led to her own. 

I’ve had occasions to wear white kurtas. But now, it’s a mental block. Sometimes, a random thought occurs to me that the next time I wear it will be at my friend AA’s funeral. 

VIII. 

I said that I don’t care too much about aging. 

I lied. 

I care. 

I care about the number. I care about it every year. 

I’ve cared about it ever since my cousin’s birthday came up soon after the death of my aunt in December 2021. And I noticed that I couldn’t even send him a birthday message. 

I don’t care about 25. That’s for sure. I definitely don’t care about turning 26, in a few months. 

But, I’ve started caring about milestones. Just specific ones. 

I care about 29 for example. 

My 29th birthday is three years away. 

My cousin passed away a few months before he even celebrated his 29th birthday. He had an entire life ahead of him. Decades of adventures, experiences, memories and connections were laid on his path.  

But all that was gone. He can’t take a step on this path now. There is an entire life that was stolen from him. 

Every year I live, I’m adding memories and experiences that my cousin cannot possibly have now. He’s not here anymore. 

From the moment I turn 29, every single day I live will be a day my cousin would never be able to savour from. I know I will care about each day I live after 29. 

My life is headed somewhere. 

He didn’t even get the chance to live through his. 

IX. 

Eight years ago, when I joined university, I was a shy, nervous and an awkward wreck. I wasn’t comfortable talking to strangers. I didn’t trust people easily. I also found it difficult to express my feelings. I wasn’t too confident in myself. I was thousands of kilometers away from home. I was lost. 

I met AA at this juncture of my life.

Back then, I didn’t laugh that much. Still don’t. 

(yes, I know that’s sad. It is what it is)

But, for whatever reason AA has this unique ability to make everyone around him laugh. I know many times where I was dying of laughter. He’d kill me with his remarks, quips, and random stories. 

Through his infectious energy, I got around to meeting new people who eventually became my closest friends. He has this extremely comforting presence around him that inevitably got me to open up and be vulnerable. I learnt to trust more wholeheartedly. He was kind, encouraging and instilled within me a quiet confidence in myself that I still carry today. 

In a myriad of tiny ways, meeting AA has made my life more magical than it was. It caused a chain reaction that altered the reality I found myself in. 

This is also why I find it so incredibly frustrating that my friend cannot see himself the way I see him. 

I’m sure there are different facets that affect him, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to live inside his head. Nevertheless, seeing him struggle is heart wrenching. I’d rather take it on by myself, than see my friend go through his struggle right now. 

AA tells me every week he wants to die. The constant misery is painful and it is hard to survive. 

He says life has toppled him. He says he hasn’t felt this defeated before. He is at the rock bottom. He doesn’t see hope. There is no point anymore. 

I wish I could just link the thoughts I have in my head to my friend. He doesn’t quite realize the many ways in which he’s radically changed my life (and so many others). 

So, when my friend says he can’t see the light anymore. I don’t get it. I am thinking about how he is the light for me. 

He says he is often surrounded by darkness which he cannot get out of, and I think about the different ways in which he added color to my rather monochromatic life. 

When my friend says that he is weak. And that he can’t find the strength to go on. I think about these lines from Rohan Joshi’s talk:

"When you feel you're weak or at your weakest and you should give up. Remember that you might think you are weak, but you're someone's source of strength, whether you know it or not." 

He was my source of strength. He continues to be. 

I wish he saw himself the way I see him. 

My friend sometimes worries about not meeting the many expectations he had of himself. He doesn’t think he’s achieved anything significant. He hasn’t hit any big milestones. He believes his 20s are going to a waste. 

He is lying.

I’m so incredibly proud of the things he’s managed to do, and the many lives he has touched. The decades ahead of him, will be much better than the decades that precede him. He is not defined by his 20s. He is astronomically more than his achievements. I hope we can continue to have a shared life and create thousands of more memories as we have already done for a decade.  

My friend wants his existence to be extinguished. He wants all of us to forget him.
I want to remember every moment I’ve lived and shared with him forever.

My friend wants to die. 
I don’t want to lose my friend to death. 

My friend hates himself. 
I love him.

I wish he saw himself the way I see him. 

Rayne Fisher-Quann has a heart-wrenching essay about everything around grief, but this specific part hit home for me:

So, I can’t stop talking about what will happen if my best friend dies. I am decimated by the loss of things that aren’t even gone yet. I am so full of the people I love — I have let so much of myself be made of them — that I can tell, with clinical specificity, precisely how little of me there could be if they were gone. The more firmly and reliably entrenched they are in my life, the more the fear persists. I, too, am defined by absence. I am a child, and anything could be taken from me at any moment. 

X. 

Adulthood to me was a series of deadlines. Anxieties around your career, struggles in your many relationships with people, and the pain of dealing with responsibilities are all things that you slowly learn to navigate. It is an excruciating way to live. 

Now, I still do think that adulthood is a series of deadlines. Just that those deadlines are the time you spend with the people you care about.  It is shorter with some, more with others. You have to acknowledge this. You can’t avoid it. You need to make the most of it. 

One of my favourite books that I’ve read in recent memory is Frederick Backman’s A Man Called Ove. It is a beautiful novel, and contains vivid descriptions of loss which I keep coming back to: 

“We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.”

If you hadn't noticed till now, I think about death a lot. 

I think about it despite not wanting to die. I want to live a long life. In that sense, you could say I’m the complete opposite of my friend (come on, my friend approves of this joke)

I want to live a fulfilling life. 

I owe it. To the unlived life of my cousin. To my aunt. To the people I care about. 

I want to carry this tiny burden of living, for those who couldn’t. 

I want to savour every moment. I want to experience the pain and the suffering that will definitely come along with living. But I also want to soak in all the delight, joy and wonderful memories that will undoubtedly come my way. I want these to be shared experiences with my friends, family and those I care about. 

I don’t know about where my life will lead me. I have no clue about my future.

I just know that as long as I’m alive, and I’m intentional with living, I’ll figure it out along the way. 

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If you’ve reached all the way, thank you so much for reading! It truly means a lot.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this essay.

Take care,

Nirmal Bhansali