Ashmita’s story - Finding Light in the Wreckage

“Let me know if you need anything.”
I hear it all the time.
It sounds nice. It sounds caring.
But I wonder if people really mean it — if they know what it would mean to actually step into this darkness with me.
Or if it’s just something they say because it’s what you’re supposed to say.

Nobody talks about the loneliness of grief.
Not the “missing someone” loneliness.
The real loneliness — the kind that changes your brain, your body, the way you move through the world.
The kind that makes even breathing feel like something you have to force yourself to do.

Losing both parents, a few years apart, to violent, ugly illnesses — it does something to you.
It breaks something in you that no one can see from the outside.
I never said goodbye to my dad. Never got the chance.
And I can never un-hear the way my mum gasped for air in her last hours, how the little machine beeped steadily as she slipped further away.
Those sounds, those images — they follow me. They crawl into my bed at night. They show up in my dreams. They wake me up gasping for air like I’m the one dying now.
Some nights I wonder if part of me already did.

I used to call my mum four times a day. Just to tell her stupid things — what I was eating, what the cat was doing.
Now, there are days when I don’t speak to anyone at all.
I sit in silence.
The silence stretches and stretches until it feels like it’s eating me.

The world gets smaller when you’re grieving.
Friends stop calling.
Plans dry up.
The invitations stop.
People don’t know what to say, so they say nothing.
Or they say “mind yourself” or “let me know if you need anything” — words that sound like a lifeline but feel like a door gently closing.

It’s hard to blame them.
Who would want to be close to this?
Who wants to sit next to a person who can barely shower some days, who can’t even fake a smile anymore, who answers “how are you?” with “honestly, not great”?

I’m nobody’s first call anymore.
Nobody’s family.
Nobody’s emergency contact.

Everyone else’s lives kept going.
Mine didn’t.

And still, I keep pretending.
I post the photos. I show up to the dinners. I laugh at the jokes.
I take trips, I smile in pictures, and everyone thinks I’m doing fine.
Nobody sees me spending half those trips hiding under hotel blankets, willing myself to get up.
Nobody knows I laugh because if I start crying, I’m not sure I’ll ever stop.

After a while, the exhaustion catches up to you.
The fight to feel something — anything — feels too heavy.
Your mind starts whispering that it would be easier to let go.
You start getting your affairs in order — quietly, calmly.
You write the letters.
You move your money.
You find a home for your cat.
You wonder if anyone will even notice you’re gone before the smell does.

But here’s the part nobody tells you:

Sometimes it only takes one person to pull you back.
One friend showing up at your door.
One voice saying “get in the car” and taking you to the hospital because you can’t save yourself anymore.
Everyone talks about villages.
But when you’re dying inside, you don’t need a village — you need two or three people willing to sit in the wreckage with you.

I’m not healed.
I’m not hopeful.
I still wake up gasping for air.
I still wonder why I’m even here.

But I’m learning not to lie about it anymore.
Not to cover it up with a filtered photo or a sarcastic joke.

I’m in therapy.
I’m in programs.
I’m trying — really fucking trying — to stay alive one day at a time.

And I’m learning that grief is uglier, messier, lonelier than anyone tells you.
But also that there are people — not many, but a few — who will climb into the dark with you.
Who will remind you, even when you can’t feel it, that you are still alive.
That you are still worth saving.

You. Are. Not. Alone.