Ode to My Father

Or, how to deal with grief and celebrate life

👋 Hey, Abhishek here! A very happy new year and a warm welcome to the 121st edition of The Sunday Wisdom. Each week I share ideas on thinking clearly and making better decisions.

An extremely sad news. My father passed away on 19th December. I want to wholeheartedly thank all of you who had taken the time to share few words of encouragement hoping for his recovery. They meant a lot. Thanks!

I took the last couple of weeks to complete his last rites and be with my mother. I’m in Kolkata right now. I’ve been here since the first week of December, as soon as I learnt about my father’s illness. I was supposed to fly to Bengaluru next week along with my mother, but I got diagnosed with COVID-19 myself yesterday. Talk about bad luck! It’s not severe and I’m self-quarantined at home. Hopefully I’ll recover soon enough and be able to travel.

My biggest concern right now is to support and rehabilitate my mother. She knows no other way to live except with my father so it’s gonna be a challenge. I’ve seen umpteen cases where spouses lose all hope after their partners pass. I don’t want that to happen to my mother. She has always been a strong independent woman and I want to make sure it stays that way. Eventually she’ll want to come back to Kolkata but for now moving away from here is the best decision. There’s just too much memory of my father in this place.

Meanwhile, if you’ve had similar experiences where you had to find way to make sure your parent stays happy after the demise of their partner, or you know someone who’ve had similar experiences, it would be great if you can share them with me. Thanks in advance!

On to this week’s essay!

This week’s essay is more personal that usual. It’s a form of catharsis for me—to come to terms with the latest events of my life. It’s also an (indirect) advice for people in a similar situation. Hope you’ll find value in it.

Note: If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart below my name (above)? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍

Also, before you go, make sure to read the last section of this newsletter. It has an important agenda I want to discuss with all of you.

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My father passed away on 19 December 2021, at 1:20am. My life hasn’t been the same ever since. Here’s how I’ve been trying to deal with everything and if you ever have to face such a situation, hopefully this will help.

There are certain events in life, after which, everything changes irreversibly. There’s no way to get back to the old way of things. For me, it when I got the call from the hospital.

The first call came at 12:43am. “We’ve some bad news. His heart has stopped working. There’s no sign of life. We are trying CPR to revive him. We’ll call you again in 15 mins.”

We didn’t get the next call until 1:27am. My mother, my partner, and I were waiting in absolute dread. These were the worst 45 mins of my life.

The funny thing is that I was still hopeful. I still believed that my father would fight back and revive. It was such a hopeless situation that I had nothing but hope to lean on. False hope! Naive hope! But hope, nonetheless.

By the time the second call had ended, I realised that there’s no way to turn back from that moment. My life will be divided into two parts from then on. The time when I have a father, and the time I don’t.

That moment marked the beginning of the life where I don’t have a father and my mother doesn’t have a husband. It was an ‘irreversible’ moment. Thenceforth everything was going to be about how we deal with this.

When you lose a loved one all of a sudden, the information registers logically but not emotionally. You know that this person is no more but your habits, reactions, behaviours aren’t attuned of the new way of things. Somebody tells you something and suddenly you think, “I should tell him this” only to realise that this can’t happen. It’s a very sad realisation.

Time takes care of this, but time is a double-edged sword. Time takes care of the pain but time also makes you forget your memories. You don’t remember everything about the person after a couple of years, and very little after a decade.

Time doesn’t heal the pain, time erases the memory. This is the real tragedy, not the passing of a loved one.

I don’t want it this way. I would rather cherish his memory, inculcate the traits I admire in him, and keep him alive — not as a memory, but as an idea. Ideas, unlike memories, live forever.

My father was a simple man but he had some unique traits that made him extremely likeable which in turn gave him a lot of advantages.

Following are my favourite lessons that I constantly try to emulate. I believe they don’t work alone, and instead build up on top of one another as a package.

1. Be authentically humble: I had heard my father say this on multiple occasions that he has gotten way more than he deserves or is capable of in this life. I dunno if it’s true but that’s not important. What important is that he believed in it with all his heart. This belief kept him extremely humble, and people loved him for that. Over the years I’ve heard countless people say something like, “Your father is among my favourite people in the world.” I believe it’s only because he was a genuinely humble person, from the bottom of his heart. There was no trickery. Authentic humility sure has its benefits. It kills ego and makes you a better human being.

2. Don’t talk behind someone’s back: There’s a saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” My father never said anything bad about anybody, at least not publicly. If he had to give strong feedback, he gave that privately. He didn’t gossip about others, not even within his closest circle. Over the years, this garnered him tremendous trust and respect. This trait set him completely apart from others. Knowing they won’t be judged, folks were genuinely honest with him. People love to gossip, especially about other people. It’s tempting. But not giving into this urge can make people feel safe with you.

3. Don’t shy away from asking for help: My father is the biggest hustler I know. Trust me, anyone who has met him even once would realise that he wasn’t even close to being one. Yet I’ve often noticed people going out of their way to help him out. He’s a nice person, yes, but another unique trait about him was he never hesitated to ask for advice or help from others — not only in important matters such as which hospital should be best for my mother’s eye surgery, but even in trivial matters such as what colour of light bulb would be good for the washroom. This made people feel important and useful. It also increased their liking for him and they naturally loved helping him out.

4. Don’t worry too much: For a typical middle class person, my father knew how to have fun. He dressed extremely well. He loved to travel. He took good care of his health. More than everything, he was always relaxed. My mother often blamed him for being way too much relaxed. And she wasn’t wrong. But I believe he remained relaxed because he was always prepared. His finances were in place. He never took any undue risks. He was disciplined and responsible. He tried to do right by everybody. This gave him a sense of freedom to relax and take it easy in the rest of the things. He knew what was in his control. He ignored what wasn’t.

5. Enjoy the little things: This was a man who took a tonne of pleasure in the simplest of things: a nice cup of black coffee, a quick chat with friends, watching a TV show with family, having a plate of potato fries, etc. He took his time to enjoy them deliberately. In no real hurry, he put his mind into enjoying everything he did throughout the day, even if it was cleaning the toilet. This made him a joyous person. He loved and enjoyed living. You could see that in his face. That’s why people enjoyed being around him so much.

I miss my father a lot. I miss him everyday. When he was at the hospital I visited him everyday. It was hard to see him like that. I cried everyday. But I haven’t cried since he has passed. Even though I miss him a lot and wish he were here, I still force myself to see the bright side and cherish his life the way he lived.

Even if our loved ones leave this world, they don’t have to leave our hearts. I don’t believe my father has left us — me and my mother. He might not be with us physically, but his lessons, his love, his teachings, his advice, are with us. Always!

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2021: A Look Back

2021 ended in the worst way for me, but it wasn’t all bad. These are some of my favourite essays — one from each month.

Sometimes instead of being coldly rational one has to be psychologically reasonable. Any decision that lets you sleep well at night is a good private decision, even if it isn’t the most rational one. A public decision, on the other hand, affects even those who don’t take part in the decision-making process, so being rational is the first priority.

A Thought Experiment is a mental tool that helps us investigate the nature of things. They help us engage in deliberate reasoning by exploring various circumstances and (often impossible) situations, and predict their implications and outcomes without conducting any real life experiments. In most cases, real life experiments aren’t feasible. Mastering thought experiments can not only help us stretch our minds but also make better decisions by confronting difficult questions.

Match quality describes the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are — their abilities and proclivities. Continuous exploration combined with a late start (instead of a head start) gives us enough room to find our match quality. If we are lucky we find it soon, but in most cases it takes time.

Relaxation is the best way to mitigate analysis paralysis. An answer at least half as good as the perfect solution in less time is a more practical solution. Always! Businesses that move fast and deal with a lot of ambiguity follow this method. Rather than wasting time searching for a perfect answer, they simply ask, “How close can we get to the perfect solution with a relaxed problem?” Turns out, pretty close!

The Chernobyl disaster didn’t happen simply because of Soviet Communist top-down regime. The Challenger disaster didn’t happen simply because of the O-ring seals failure. The second wave of the Coronavirus didn’t take over India simply due to lack of adequate healthcare in the country. A marketing strategy doesn’t fail simply because you didn’t include animal photos. These so called “root causes” are part of many reasons, and they are definitely not the main reason.

A problem is not the real problem. The real problem is either a fallacy in our knowing, our understanding, our focus, or our perception. If we don’t consciously focus on learning more about how the world works, we’ll waste a lot of time reacting to things without knowledge.

As much as we dislike them, cast, religious, and linguistic sentiments are central in politics. We cannot comprehend how ingrained these identities are, especially in a culturally diverse nation such as India. And… as much as we would hate to admit, the divide in society along caste and religious lines aren’t disappearing anytime soon.

How does one tell the difference between persistence and stubbornness? When someone challenges the project you’ve invested years in, do you defend with anger or do you investigate with genuine curiosity?

Even though it’s safe to assume that the field of medicine is the epitome of scientific method, ironically, it wasn’t always so. In fact it was the opposite. It was a field marred with arrogance, hubris, and a sheer lack of scientific rigour. Most importantly, what medicine lacked was doubt. Doubt is not a fearful thing and, as we’ll soon learn, it’s what propels science forward.

Our need for a 100% fair system often gets in the way of having an efficient system. On paper, it’s good to have 100% fair system, but in practice, an 80% fair system is fair enough. Unlike a theoretical system, it gets 100% of the job done.

Like everything, even success comes with a price tag. The key is figuring out what that price is and being willing to pay it. The problem however is that the price of a lot of things is not obvious (or remain hidden) till the very end.

Logic is a good way to defend a decision, but it is not a good way to make a decision. Logic that works in theory may not work in practice. A place might meet all the important criteria on paper but still may not be liveable. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is also being logical.

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Before You Go…

I’m considering turning this ‘free’ newsletter into paid. That would motivate me to invest more in the quality of the content. As of now I write whatever I’ve recently read or whatever I want to write about. Making it paid would force me to deliver more ‘original’ content, thereby increasing its quality.

I would detach this newsletter from CoffeeAndJunk.com completely and post 4–5 issues a month, one of them being free for all and the rest being accessible only to paid subscribers.

It wouldn’t be very costly, but won’t be cheap either. I’m thinking somewhere around $5 or ~₹375 a month. Let me know what you think. Is it worth it? Would you be willing to pay? 🤔

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋