By Zehra Mehdi
After the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, everyone has started to talk about the importance of reaching out, of not losing hope and of being positive. Some insist on the semantics of death vs dying. Others call it an institutional, systemic failure. Psychotherapists share their details with an urgent insistence as the majority of people will lament the loss of talent as the death of Sushant Singh hits home.
The truth is, we all have learnt to live with people dying around us. It scares us for sometime, till we resume our lives mocking, negating, and denying the existence of all emotional crisis.
In the prose of positivity there is no vocabulary to describe despair and misery. No one posts videos of saying how they are unable to cope even as panel discussions, and webinars flood in with messages of ‘taking care’ and ‘mindfulness.’ We are a culture of success, of progress, of production, where we win, we overcome, we get over. What becomes of people who succumb, who die, who can’t make it? They become examples of caution, role models of how ‘not to be weak.’ I don’t care if he was weak or strong. There no dignity in death and it’s not in us to restore it to him. I am sad we didn’t give him an option to feel other than what he was feeling.
So, I hope we aren’t strong and delude ourselves into yet again believing that we can overcome it at once . Take a moment to mourn. Take a moment to realize someone was alone. Take a moment to be vulnerable.