We needed a break…

… and so we got away for a week in late September, away from Manchester the city that was Naseeb’s home, and went to an island in Scotland called the Isle of Bute.  It’s a small island, not far from Glasgow.  I worried what it would be like to be somewhere that had no reminders of Naseeb, and none of his identity there in any way.  It was a quiet island with hardly any tourists, lots of sea to look at and easy to get around.  Would it help us in our ongoing pain and anguish, or make us feel like alienated strangers and intensify the trauma and shock that we were still experiencing?

Oddly, I found myself remembering Naseeb with more clarity than if I had been surrounded by continual snippets of him everywhere, which has been our comfort zone for some months.  None of these snippets – photos, clothes, objects, possessions, books, and so on – are actually him, they are a fixed moment and each misses his real essence even if they come from his essence.  They are not him, and I yearn for him, to have him back.  I’d give my life for that, but it’s not possible.

Watching the infinite sea, feeling the blustery wind, walking over unspoilt landscapes, seeing nature commanding itself outside human control.  Naseeb too is outside human control now.  Maybe he’s mingling with all those raw elements, maybe his soul energy is still active in some form that is intangible to us mortals, maybe… or maybe not.  Who knows.  Either way, it was good to be focused on raw nature in parallel with our raw emotions for Naseeb, away from the complexities of the modern world which had collapsed in on him.

Occasionally around Scotland you will see the odd cairn, which is a pile of stones built up into a cone or pyramid in some way.  They are often built as landscape markers that can be of wildly varying sizes, but can also be memory cairns for loved ones.  A local bay full of stones that had been weathered for centuries made good materials for a simple cairn to remember Naseeb by. After collecting a batch of stones riddled with grooves eroded into them, I built a very small and simple one on the Isle of Bute.

These and other things don’t ease the pain, they don’t resolve the questions, they don’t support us when we break down which we do regularly and will be doing for a long time, or anything else.  They just help focus our emotions and feelings, diffuse their intensity, and maybe provide a marker around which to share grief and confront our reality.  We’ll need a lot of these breaks I guess.   It’s called managing, but it’s not coping – that might never happen. Maybe this tiny glimpse of our visit gives a taste of the depth of debilitating sadness taking place for us.

In case anybody reading this is thinking of taking their own life and also thinking that others won’t be affected much or will even be better off afterwards, I’ll just say you really can’t be more misguided and plain wrong than that.  We are left travelling on a lifelong road full of ditches, thorns, whirlwinds, floods and earthquakes.  We can barely hold on, our hearts regularly lose all strength.  Still, the odd resting spot on that road and maybe time to build a small cairn does have something going for it.

Posted by Kooj / Kuljit Chuhan (Naseeb’s Dad)

Some photos of the Isle of Bute, Naseeb’s grandparents hallway, and around Budle Bay:

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