How to keep warm in winter

When Kumar Jesudasan died of terminal illness, his widow Usha found an outlet for her grief and a way to express her many questions. She wrote a book. I Will Lie Down in Peace turned out to be a much-appreciated personal account of a family walking through the valley in the shadow of death. The response to the book was so overwhelming that it was possible for the author to temporarily forget the actual change in her life that was to descend on her and the children by the removal of the male cover of the home.Then suddenly it hit her, when she accidentally came across this "frozen ball" that had taken over where her heart once stood. And she realised with astonished wonderment, "This pain, this coldness, this numbness, this must be grief." Like many others, Usha had always thought that grief was just enhanced, deep sadness. Now, like them, she discovered, it could actually be physical too. "My stomach tightened and it felt like a thousand clamps were opening and shutting inside me. Painful cramps one moment, a feeling of relief the next." As she would literally sigh with relief, the pain would start again. The worst part was when the day would stretch out before her "like a yard of ribbon." Then there was the rage. She came across a magnificent anniversary gift Kumar had presented her with, tiny couples of shells, which drew close to form one large heart. The gleaming bits of mother of pearl stared up at her, like a taunt. She flung it down, shattering it into a thousand little fragments. "I didn''t want this gift, I wanted the man who gave it to me." Being a writer, a broadcaster, a highly literate woman who''d lived abroad, Usha was too intelligent to nurture a victim-complex. She knew how to look around and see that actually brokenness is the norm, it is a way of life for many people "caught up in tragic situations, difficult circumstances, accidents, divorce, death, poverty, disease and natural calamities." The depressing part of it was that for most of them it was an imprisonment through no fault of their own. Like Usha feels, "The suffering seems undeserved, baffling and cruel. There is no justice to it. There seems to be no meaning to it." Nevertheless it is there like an uninvited guest and there is no one who can understand the tearing apart, the isolation; no, not even God. Usha, like millions of others, joins C.S. Lewis'' musing, as he wrote after the death of his wife, in A Grief Observed. Lewis'' question: "Where is God when you need him? Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." It was, like Usha herself encountered, "a deafening silence". Then, the amazing part, "It is in that very silent and stillness, in that supreme Presence that we begin to discover who we really are." When Usha started to pick up the threads of life again it was like going on a journey, a long journey where "paths diverged in different directions." She chose the longer, harder road, which called for much. "It required that I faced myself squarely and looked into my heart to understand my feelings, my desires and my goals honestly. It required constant emptying of negative feelings of looking up for healing and wholeness and coming to terms slowly with all that was lost. In acceptance and peace, not in anger and resignation." Usha''s second book, When Winter Comes published by East West Books and released on Jan 13, is a must-keep-under-pillow book for all who have been afflicted by the winter of life, not just through death of a loved one, but also because of a loss of job, or a broken relationship. It''s a literary gem. Listen to this: "In life, we treasure that which is most fragile. When someone gives us a piece of handcrafted crystal, we keep it in a special place and handle it with great care, lest it breaks. Its very fragility makes it most precious. In reality, that which is most fragile and most precious to us in life is our relationships with each other. Yet, unlike crystal, we treat our relationships roughly and abuse them with our selfishness." Accepting our flaws is the first step towards strength. We can then join Keats in his Ode to the West Wind and sing, yeah, if the winter comes, can spring be far behind?