How Chris Hemsworth helped me grieve

Recently, I was confronted by the trickiest emotion I had ever faced – grief. We are all inevitably struck by grief at some point in our lives, the shadow that follows death but is cast on the living. In some ways, I was fortunate to have only experienced it at the somewhat mature age of twenty-one, and in a somewhat natural course of life. 

My grandfather passed away at the age of 90, after suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three years. I was extremely close to him – he taught me to play chess and golf, he picked me up from pre-school almost every day, and we often watched sports or the sitcom Friends together. He was always smartly dressed as a former colonel, yet reticent and introverted. Watching a loved one like that drift helplessly into themselves is a heart-wrenching experience that unfortunately a lot of us face due to Alzheimer’s disease. You also guiltily think it might prepare you for what is to come…

It doesn’t.

I opened my phone to two missed calls from my mother. I already had a bad feeling because she hardly ever called without texting first, and she wouldn’t respond to my “what’s wrong?” text. I didn’t know how to feel or what I felt when she told me. I could tell she was crying, but I couldn’t. It felt like a different reality. My family was at home in India, grieving together. The distance between us wasn’t a continent or an ocean, but an infinite void.

Everyone around me was going about their lives. Living normally felt inexplicably wrong to me while my family performed final rituals and held a cremation. Yet nothing was wrong in Utrecht or Amsterdam. I could hardly get myself to talk about it because I hated it when people apologised for my loss. It felt awkward and automatic, and undermined the loss itself since it hardly ever felt genuine to me or to my relationship with Nanu. In those first couple of days, I knew I was only waiting to remember some little detail, see something he liked, maybe just smell French Fries (he loved them though he wasn’t supposed to eat them anymore), and the grief would come crashing down, as I struggled to maintain some form of composure. 

One of these moments happened when my friends and I were discussing “hall-passes” as a silly drunk game on a Friday night, and one of them admitted “Chris Hemsworth”. She followed this with a severe moral dilemma in light of his likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s, which was recently publicised. I remember (through a slightly tipsy haze) that I went very silent as my eyes teared up uncontrollably. My friends were shocked, but I did not shy away from sharing his story this time. It felt like I had finally connected Delhi’s reality to Amsterdam’s as my friends comforted me, and it brought me just a little closer to accepting my loss. 

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