It can be hard to know whom to reach out to, in the aftermath of a loss. Should it be a professional or a group, an online or offline one? People like oneself, or people whose loss most closely resembles one’s own?
“It’s easy to find resources for emotional support and to connect with others going through difficult times on social media. But healing following traumatic loss is an intimate, personal process, requiring deep introspection,” says Dr Lisa Shulman, professor of neurology at the University of Maryland and author of Before and After Loss: A Neurologist’s Perspective… (2018).
If grieving rituals around the world look the way they do (calendars of events; opportunities to memorialise), it’s because that is one truth that endures: As we live with the repercussions of loss, it can help to find ways, large and small, to honour our loved ones to bring us comfort, Dr Shulman says.
That is the path radio jockey Stutee Ghosh aka RJ Stutee chose, when she lost her father Ranjan Ghosh, a philosophy professor, artist and art critic, to Covid-19 in May 2021.
The programming head at Fever FM (which is owned by HT Media Ltd, which also publishes the Hindustan Times), was known for her vivacious radio personality and celebrity chat shows. After her father’s death, at age 70, she could not find her feet, could not regain equilibrium, she says.
He was gone so suddenly, in the midst of such a “cold, distant, isolated, unnatural time”. In her anguish, she turned to the microphone.
Between June and August 2021, she hosted a nine-episode podcast called Mera Wala Grief on HT Smartcast. Along with Deepti Ahuja, head of content and production at HT Smartcast, she crafted a conversational show on which celebrities ranging from filmmakers Hansal Mehta and Guneet Monga to broadcaster Barkha Dutt could talk about how they coped with the loss of a parent, partner or friend.
In a strange time, the podcast acted as “a safe space for people to be vulnerable,” Ahuja says. “There was space for silence, tears, shaky voices, dark sarcasm… various shades of grief.”
Ghosh shared details from her father’s life. In her conversation with Dutt, the two discussed the guilt that sprung from their helplessness in the face of the virus; talked about living in fear of the grief that swamped them in waves; and of their struggle to find meaning in the everyday again.
Mehta spoke of the grief that came from losing a father with whom he didn’t have a very expressive relationship. “I really thought that my father would outlive me; he was a fighter,” he said.
Writer-producer Sutapa Sikdar spoke of losing her husband, actor Irrfan Khan, to cancer in 2020. She and Ghosh discussed the ineffable things they hadn’t expected to find painful: the way Sikdar missed Urdu and watched Pakistani TV shows just to hear the language, now that Irrfan was no longer around to sprinkle it into conversation. The way Ghosh couldn’t bring herself to eat the Bengali dishes that her father had most enjoyed.
The idea was for the podcast to show that grief is not just dark, amorphous and morbid, though it can often seem so from the outside. It is essentially a way of coping, remembering, and processing love that now has nowhere to go.
People responded to that, calling in and emailing to connect with a version of RJ Stutee they had not expected to see. They shared stories of their own loss, and legacies they hoped to keep alive.
For Stutee, the sense of catharsis was immense. There was also comfort in knowing that she was not alone. “It wasn’t just me who couldn’t sleep at night, who was constantly rifling through my loved one’s belongings or suddenly feeling this tightness in my chest,” she says.
By the ninth episode, she knew it was time to stop. It was becoming difficult to carry on with the same intensity. “It took every ounce of strength in me to do the podcast, and it was a journey of discovering myself. As of right now, I don’t think I could go back to that phase,” she says.
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American broadcaster Anderson Cooper, meanwhile, has released a second season of his grief podcast, All There Is, launched in September 2022. He lost his father at age 10, a brother when he was 21, and his mother in 2019. His podcast seeks to decode his own experiences of loss. “I realised… that I’ve never really grieved before… Experiencing loss and actually grieving are two different things,” he told CNN last month. Season 2 of All There Is was released last month.
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