Today Is The Birthday Of My Late Brother-In-Law

My brother-in-law passed away last year in an unfortunate car accident. He was only forty-five. His daughter has just started her graduation this year, while his son is still in high school. It pains me to imagine that till the last year, this day would have been a happy one in his family, but not so today.

I have been close to his wife, my first cousin. She is some years older than me. Ours is your regular close-knit Indian middle-class family. The two of us spent quite a bit of time together before and after she got engaged to my brother-in-law. I was very much around when the family was looking up matrimonial matches for her. I’ve seen first-hand her pain when any rejection was treated like a progress report of her performance in life. I saw her happiness when she found my brother-in-law. I heard her gush over how he noticed her vulnerabilities and promised her a lifetime of security. 

She has always been one of the simplest, most guileless women you could come across. She has been the ideal daughter, the ideal wife, the ideal daughter-in-law, and the ideal mother. Simply put, she has been the woman who always did right by everyone. This was the reason that our entire family was in disbelief over the tragedy for months. How could fate have been so cruel to someone so nice!

I too was in disbelief and I wanted to do anything, at least something that could help her. I gave her the book ‘Option B’ written by Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook. Sandberg wrote the book after she lost her young husband to sudden heart failure. She wrote it as a guide for processing grief. I hoped that Sheryl’s story and experience would help my cousin cope and come to terms with her own grief.

The Multiple Tragedies Of Losing A Husband In India

Little did I know that her experience as an Indian woman who lost her husband was to be so different from Sandberg’s. The loss of her husband was not the only tragedy my cousin lived through. She had to suffer all that the death of a husband means in an orthodox society. People opined on her future as if they had inherited her like property. It didn’t help that at the time of the accident, the family was in the middle of moving cities. Suddenly, the place she should live at, where her children should study- all became matters of public debate. And also tests for her loyalties.

She even had to face comments and allegations like ‘getting over her grief too soon’. In this day and age! Women get diktats all the time over how to enjoy and celebrate life. But as if that was not enough, people were now telling her how to grieve her husband’s death. 

I figured that Sandberg’s book needed another chapter to be relevant in the Indian society. A chapter on how the Indian society helps you process your grief faster. It focuses on everything other than your need to process the grief so that you too are forced to shift your focus. 

How the Indian society still practises Sati! No, it doesn’t burn the woman to death over her husband’s pyre anymore. It baptises her by fire and helps her achieve a phoenix-like rebirth. It makes a woman drown her ‘niceness’ and ‘idealness’ with her husband’s ashes. Indian society tests her even at some of the most delicate moments of her life. And reveals to her how futile her tireless efforts to please everyone around had been. She emerges a new woman who has finally broken out of the mould, developed a thick skin and has learnt to say ‘no’. 

A Rebirth Is What It Is

I wish my cousin didn’t have to lose what she has, to come to this stage. But I am relieved to see her having come out self-assured and more independent than ever. Today when I remember my brother-in-law, and I think about her, sad and sorry for her is not the only way I feel. I find peace in the fact that she is now a symbol of strength and resolve to our family. The same family who were looking at her as one helpless woman only a few months back. I see the promise of a day in the future when she will remember him and smile at the happy memories he left behind.

Didi, he led you to find your ground. He did give you a lifetime of security. He kept his promise!