“Kal Ho Naa Ho” is one of Bollywood’s most well-known films. A romantic drama set in New York City, the film is a guilty pleasure my mom and I indulged in when I was a child, regularly popping the disc into our DVD player.
The production stars Shah Rukh Khan, who plays Aman Mathur, the witty and charismatic boy next door to Naina Catherine Kapur, a cynical MBA student, played by Preity Zinta. The two unsurprisingly fall in love and despite the innately cheesy plot, watching Naina and Aman’s relationship bloom on screen always brought a smile to my and my mom’s faces.
In the movie, before Naina is able to share her feelings out loud, she spots a wedding photo of Aman and another woman. Caught off guard, she runs away from his house heartbroken. She later learns the woman in the photo is not his wife, but his doctor. This is when she, alongside first-time “Kal Ho Naa Ho” viewers, finds out Aman has a fatal heart condition.
Aman doesn’t outwardly reciprocate her feelings because he won’t be alive to spend the rest of his life with her. The film ends with him at his deathbed, wishing a tearful Naina a happy life.
In English, “Kal Ho Naa Ho” translates to “may not be there tomorrow.”
At the time, the film’s sentimental nature was simply another cliche aspect of a dramatic romance to me, something my mom and I watched at home for the sake of my own entertainment.
One evening, when I was 7, the two of us lay on the couch as “Kal Ho Naa Ho” played on the television, watching it just as earnestly as we had the first time. The film’s closing scene showed Naina years in the future, sharing dear memories of Aman with her family.
The movie ended like it always did, but my night ended differently than usual.
A few hours after the credits rolled, our landline touted a shrill ring and my mom rushed to answer it. I walked into the living room minutes later to see her laying flat on her back with her hands covering her eyes as she sobbed quietly.
I would soon learn that earlier that week, she had visited her oncologist, concerned that her breast cancer had resurfaced.
Days later, my mom’s doctor confirmed her relapse.
My mom passed away a year and a half later. Leading up to her death, I was constantly surrounded by the realities of living with a suffering, unwell parent.
For days at a time I stayed at home with my grandmother while my mom received chemotherapy treatments at a hospital five hours away from home. My mom once drove me to a piano class after school and suddenly began throwing up, almost crashing our maroon Nissan Pathfinder on one of the busiest roads of our North Texas suburb.
One night, my before-bed conversation with her was abruptly cut short by the onset of sudden breathing problems. Minutes later, there was an ambulance blaring outside our home while paramedics carried her out on a stretcher. The neighbors all stared as my dad hurriedly tried to make sense of what was going on. I cautiously stood near my front door, too shocked and afraid to inch any closer to the sirens.
Seeing my mom pull chunks of her hair out until she lost it all and watching her grow increasingly fatigued was frightening and unknown to me. I had never seen my mom lack enthusiasm in anything she did, but suddenly, she didn’t even have the energy to get out of bed.
She was no longer able to pick me up from school or piece together vivid artwork or cheerfully dance and sing to our favorite Hindi songs. She used to spend her nights reciting the Hanuman Chalisa, a Hindu prayer hymn, to me before I would go to sleep. But after her diagnosis, she became increasingly restless, nearly unable to narrate the hymn through the lethargic rasp in her voice.
Despite months of hospitalization and chemotherapy, my mom lost her battle to breast cancer at 38 years old.
When I look back on her experience with the disease and her passing, I’m always met with memories of how I began my journey with grief. My coping method was meager, almost fleeting; on the day my mom died, I cried for a few minutes and went about the rest of my day, acting as if nothing had happened.
While my parents’ friends visited my house to console my dad and grandparents, I sat alone in my dad’s office purposefully avoiding them as I watched a movie, acting like I was just another normal kid enjoying a leisurely summer. I even went to my best friend’s house that afternoon, choosing not to tell her about the day’s events. If I acted like she hadn’t died, then maybe she had never gotten sick. Everything was normal, I convinced myself.
My mom suffered from cancer for a year and a half. And in less than an hour, I pretended that I had already processed losing her, trying to immediately revert myself back to who I was before her diagnosis.
Today, I believe I’ve slowly inched toward acceptance of my mom’s passing.
Now, at least sometimes, I allow myself to tell those around me what happened in my life when I was younger. I let myself dig through some of her old jots and scribbles, ones in which she wrote down her travel bucket lists and interests at the time, which I’ve kept tucked away in a box in my dorm room. I cry when I need to, something I avoided doing for years.
I did not follow a smooth path to reach this point. My grief was almost completely internalized – my pain perplexingly nonexistent – for years after she passed away.
Soon after she died, my dad and I began making the half-hour drive to Journey of Hope, a grief support group, twice a week, at which we gathered with others who had lost their loved ones. We would split into rooms by age and I’d listen to other kids talk about the passing of their sibling or parent or friend.
“I’m Anushka, I’m 9. My mom passed away in August. Breast cancer.”
I rarely went farther than reciting that script. The remainder of the session consisted of others talking and me listening, afraid to say anything out loud because I didn’t want to hear my voice quiver. Sharing more about my mom’s death than just the basics was frightening to me. If I let myself sob in a room full of people, then my grief was real, and I knew I was nowhere near ready to accept her passing yet.
Don’t get me wrong, the grief support group helped at times. It was comforting to be surrounded by other kids who shared some of my experiences for once because being a motherless 9-year-old isn’t exactly common.
But maybe I tucked my emotions away because I was surrounded by strangers. After all, I only saw those in my group for two hours per week. Maybe I would be able to share my feelings with my grandmother and mom’s sisters, I thought.
But I soon realized my relatives’ approach to coping seemed quite different from mine. My aunt spoke to a picture of my mom daily, as if to cling onto every memory of her. I watched her from the other room, perplexed at how someone could so openly revisit the wounds left by my mom’s death. My grandmother wept at the very mention of her daughter’s name, constantly glancing at the photo of my mom perched above her bed.
Meanwhile, I would sit in the corner of the room, absolutely silent as they grieved. I began to feel uncomfortable in my own grandparents’ home. I felt abnormal surrounded by others who approached their pain so differently from me. While my relatives performed at one extreme of the grief spectrum, I was stuck at the other.
I should be crying, too, I thought.
In high school, a friend asked me why I only talked about my dad and never my mom. I panicked, racking my brain for some way to answer her question without including the truth.
Flustered, I nervously told her my mom has a busy work schedule – “She’s kind of too busy at work to be around that much.” I was older and more mature, but I was no closer to acceptance. Instead I told a baldfaced lie, to myself and to my friends.
I had all the support I needed: My friends, family and community were working overtime to make sure I had endless resources at my disposal. Middle school counselors could pick me out of the crowd, making sure to check up on me. And my closest friends were there for me if I ever needed it. But I had built a tailored avoidance to addressing my mom’s passing – something that followed me even as I grew up.
Everyone deals with grief differently, but besides the occasional tear, sometimes I feel like I barely dealt with it at all.
My dad’s approach to grief was a lot like mine.
He’s always been a relatively closed-off person. I only saw him shed a few tears throughout my mom’s fight with cancer, and he rarely brought up the topic to anyone. Regardless, he always reminded me that he was there for me, but I still found myself unable to open up to him. Grief was eager to strain my relationships.
Dodging my grief for so long prompted our dissociation over the years, pushing my dad and I apart. He was one of the few people who truly understood what I was going through. We were missing the same person in our home, but I still found myself reluctant to ever bring up my mother.
This wasn’t just the common phenomenon of teenagers distancing themselves from their parents. Having kept my emotions sealed away for so long, I felt like I couldn’t talk to my dad about even the simplest things, like the basics of my middle school day. It felt odd to engage in small talk and discuss matters of little relevance when there was a looming, traumatizing event we continued to ignore.
I began pulling away from him at the dinner table, feeling uncomfortable sitting down with him. I think he felt the same way, unsure of how to avoid a topic neither of us were open to sharing about.
My dad and I have similar personalities and shared paralleled grieving processes. But instead of bringing us closer together, grief drew us further apart. I began to notice the grief unravel my own home; it proved to me that it could control even my strongest bond. My internalization was starting to catch up with me.
The emotions I had been trying to annex away began to resurface, not only tugging at my closest relationships, but also controlling my thoughts and imagination. Sometimes my casual daydreams would lead me to imagining my life with my mom in it.
She would have helped me move in to college, stuffing multiple suitcases chock-full of brightly colored room decor, all of which wouldn’t even fit into my plaza triple. After a day of unpacking, organizing and repacking, we would have stopped by a bookstore and then ventured to the beach.
My mom had been in and out of hospitals since she was 14, and I know she would have supported my interests in health care. She would be pleased to know I work for a newspaper, as her dearest hobbies included reading and writing.
I’ve thought about how my winter breaks would be if I were to fly home to Dallas and see her. She would have a fridge full of all my favorite Indian dishes, such as pav bhaji, and an eloquently detailed list of subzis she planned to prepare for me. She would dig up even more Bollywood classics from the cabinet, stacking them up so I could easily choose the next one to watch.
Snap out of it.
Every time I let my mind wander, I didn’t let it stay there for too long. The longer I pretended, the harder it was to draw back to reality. I couldn’t allow myself to stay in that world for more than a few minutes because I knew it would lead to tears.
I ignored my mom’s death for years, unsure how to revisit it years after her passing. But one day, somewhat spontaneously, I remember finally letting myself consider my loss. At 17, I began a gradual trek toward acceptance.
The unfamiliar feeling was possibly caused by my forthcoming transition to college: I was beginning to reflect on leaving my home – the one that my mother had so intricately decorated – and leaving the town full of people who supported me ever since her passing. I recalled memories from the day she died and I pondered about all the moments we missed out on together. This time, I didn’t berate myself for entertaining these thoughts after just a few minutes.
I believe my delayed grieving process had a major role in my becoming who I am. By closing myself off to my dad, my relatives and my closest friends, I’ve hindered relationships with others and I’ve hindered my own emotional growth. I’ve been extremely picky with what I’ve shared with people around me, being an open book about some topics while promptly shutting myself off when someone mentions family.
Looking back, I wish I had opened up to my relatives and to my dad. I would have strengthened my ties with my family rather than feeling out of place when they were grieving and I was not. I feel close to my dad again today, but that bond was weak for most of my teenage life.
But I don’t blame myself or anyone around me. My family and community supported me in every way they could while simultaneously managing to cope. And I was only 9 when I lost my mom. My ingrained mindset of denial may have stemmed from immaturity or simply being too young to fully grasp what had happened. I can’t blame myself for shying away from acceptance because maybe I wasn’t ready to accept it at that age.
Everyone loses someone eventually who they have shared a relationship with that nobody else could ever fully grasp. Some people talk about it openly and others refrain until they feel comfortable. Some deal with it head-on, like my grandparents and aunts, who openly mourned with one another, and others, like myself, in a private manner.
The closing scene of “Kal Ho Naa Ho” highlights Naina in a snowy landscape 20 years after Aman’s death, as she sits beside her younger sister and slowly cries while talking about him.
“He became a memory, a memory that is the foundation of all my relationships. ... I can never forget him,” she says in Hindi.
Ever since my mom received the phone call with her diagnosis, the film became an emblem of her death. I no longer associate it with comfort, despite it being a story my mom and I used to love, something we shared together. I haven’t watched the full movie again since that night.
But now, when I remember the ending, I feel a sense of hope. I see myself in Naina; we both lost someone incredibly central in our lives. I have struggled to talk or think about my mom, but I saw Naina openly share how Aman impacted her life 20 years after his death.
I feel like I am working toward this type of acceptance, and I can see myself nearing a point at which I might feel just as comfortable talking about my mom as Naina is sharing memories of Aman. I hope that I do reach this point someday, in which I am able to openly tell others about the kind of relationship my mom and I shared and what kind of a person she was.