TW: Death, Death of a pet
Today I was reading a book and there was an incident that pushed me into thoughts. In the story, a five-year-old kid is asking why his hamster wouldn't be able to play with him. And his babysitter is faced with the most difficult task in the world. Explain death, loss, and grief to a five-year-old. The first death that happened in my family was when I was really young. Though the person would have been someone really close to me by bloodline, that wasn't the case, unfortunately. What was a 7-year-old supposed to know about death? All she knew was what she had gathered from movies that she had watched. And in those, the people who died always came back as different characters in another movie. So, it didn't make any sense. The second major death came when I was 9. I had grown to know more about death and grief but again was minimal. I attended a funeral for the first time when I was 12 and that's when I had gotten to know the intensity of what
a death entails.
There were so many more deaths and funerals that followed but the one that hit close was when our pet Malu passed away. Even as I type about it, my fingers are trembling. I'm still not over it, I haven't processed it and neither has anyone in my family. Malu came into our lives all of a sudden on one school afternoon. She was just a baby parrot that had fallen off a tree to us on Day 1. Once she was given the name Malu, she started becoming a part of our life. My sister would spend hours talking to Malu and I would try to teach her to talk. The only sound she made was the ringing of our telephone. She had mastered it and was a pro. She was one little noisy brat when with us and she would turn into the meekest one when someone else would come.
This is the first time I'm talking about Malu after her passing away on 2nd June 2017. It was a Friday morning, we were dressing up to get ready for attending Catechism. Her silence was nothing unusual in the early hours of the day. But soon we discovered that that wasn’t the case. Silence engulfed us. While my sister broke down into tears, the rest of us held back and pretended to be strong. Malu was closest to my dad and we all loved her beyond everything. Living in a flat in a foreign land meant that we couldn’t even bury her. It still haunts me to date. I am still seeking closure on what happened. After that incident, we never spoke of having a pet or rushed past pet stores. We feared loving and getting attached again.
In the story I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, the babysitter along with the 5-year-old child buries the hamster in their garden and places a rock with its name on it. He makes sure that the kid gets to say his final goodbyes. Something which I haven’t still made peace with. Later on, the babysitter gets him a new hamster much to the kid’s mother’s dismay. She had seen the 5-year-old in pain over losing his pet and didn’t want him to go through the same. But the babysitter tells her how it is important for him to learn to love again even if death lurked around the corner and one day he would be in pain all over again. The important part was to let oneself love again despite the pain that may come in the future.
I reread the paragraph again and again until I couldn’t with how blurry my eyes had gotten. Any mention of pets brought me memories of Malu and how I couldn’t bid her a proper goodbye. A few years ago when I bought a few fish for my sister I tried my best to evade them, not to get too attached. It happened sooner than expected, in a span of twenty days, all four fishes had met with their demise and my sister who had named them and taken care of them was in pain all over again. It only pushed me further from the idea of having a pet. I would say I would be a dog mom with five or six dogs to just humor the idea but I don’t think I could ever do that in real life. I’m too afraid to do that.
Death made a return in our lives when my father was resuscitated twice at different timelines in the past year. Death became something that hung over us like a heavy rain cloud. And then my sister asked me to write about the funeral I want and who should be invited just before I got into surgery. Planning your own funeral hits the final nail in the journey of discovering death. By the grace of all good things in the world, death had left us alone. For once we were in bright sunshine. But it was short-lived, a close friend of ours was taken away. A 19-year-old girl with whom we had grown up, had silly fights with, made silly jokes about and gone caroling around. And this wasn’t the first time we had lost someone we had spent our childhood with.
To love again without being afraid of death is what I’m looking forward to. Like the little boy who learned that it was perfectly alright to love again despite the warning of being in pain again.
I miss you so much Malu and I hope I will be able to love a pet again...