In my last blog post, I wrote about a missing paragraph. I did not keep that text anywhere, I just deleted it while reviewing the post. Later Jason asked me in the comments to actually post that paragraph too.

So, I will write about it. 2018 was an amazing year, all told;, good, great, and terrible moments all together. Things were certain highs , and a few really low moments. Some things take time to heal, some moments make a life long impact.

The second part of 2018 went downhill at a pretty alarming rate, personally. Just after coming back from PyCon US 2018, from the end of May to the beginning of December, within 6 months we lost 4 family members. On the night of 30th May, my uncle called, telling me that my dad was admitted to the hospital, and the doctor wanted to talk to me. He told me to come back home as soon as possible. There was a very real chance that I wouldn’t be able to talk to him again. Anwesha and I, managed to reach Durgapur by 9AM and dad passed away within a few hours. From the time of that phone call, my brain suddenly became quite detached, very calm and thinking about next steps. Things to be handled, official documents to be taken care of, what needs to be done next.

I felt a few times that I’dburst into tears, but, the next thing that sprang to mind was that if I started crying, that would affect my mother and rest of the family too. Somehow, I managed not to cry and every time I got emotionally overwhelmed, I started thinking about next logical steps. I actually made sure, I did not talk about the whole incident much, until recently after things settled down. I also spent time in my village and then in Kolkata.

In the next 4 months, there have been 3 more deaths. Every time the news came, I did not show any reaction, but, it hurt.

Our education system is what supposed to help us grow in life. But, I feel it is more likely, that school is just training for the society to work cohesively and to make sure that the machines are well oiled. Nothing prepares us to deal with real life incidents. Moreover, death is a taboo subject with most of us.

Coming back to the effect of these demises, for a moment it created a real panic in my brain. What if I just vanish tomorrow? In my mind, our physical bodies are some amazing complex robots / programs. When one fails, the rest of them try to cope , try to fill in the gaps. But, the nearby endpoints never stay the same. I am working as usual, but, somehow my behavior has changed. I know that I have a long lasting problem with emails, but, that has grown a little out of hand in the last 5 months. I am putting in a lot of extra effort to reply to the emails I actually managed to notice. Before that, I was opening the editor to reply, but my mind blanked, and I could not type anything.

I don’t quite know how to end the post. The lines above are almost like a stream of consciousness in my mind and I don’t even know if they make sense in the order I put them in. But, at the same time, it makes sense to write it down. At the end of the day, we are all human, we make mistakes, we all have emotions, and often times it is okay to let it out.

In a future post, I will surely write another post talking about the changes I am bringing in my life to cope.