Remembering Irrfan Khan’s death, Sutapa Sikdar shares beautiful lines from Louise Gluck’s poem ‘A Fantasy’ that captures the pain of a widow bearing the loss of her husband.
Losing someone special is never easy. While the people may tell you the pain will go away with time, it doesn’t. You just learn how to live with this pain forever. Expressing how she is going through the ‘life and death experience of her husband Irrfan Khan, Sutapa recently shared a heart-breaking poem by Louise Gluck, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier today.
Sutapa shared a photo of Irrfan’s grave in Mumbai, which was decorated with roses along with this poem. The beautiful lines reflect on the deep anguish that a widow suffers and what goes in her mind when she has to deal with the irreparable loss in her life.
Here are the beautiful lines from the poem ‘A Fantasy’ by Louise Gluck
I’ll tell you something: every day
people are dying. And that’s just the beginning.
Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born,
new orphans. They sit with their hands folded,
trying to decide about this new life.
Then they’re in the cemetery, some of them
for the first time. They’re frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean
saying a few words, sometimes
throwing dirt in the open grave.
And after that, everyone goes back to the house,
which is suddenly full of visitors.
The widow sits on the couch, very stately,
so people line up to approach her,
sometimes take her hand, sometimes embrace her.
She finds something to say to everbody,
thanks them, thanks them for coming.
In her heart, she wants them to go away.
She wants to be back in the cemetery,
back in the sickroom, the hospital. She knows
it isn’t possible. But it’s her only hope,
the wish to move backward. And just a little,
not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.
Isn’t it heart-touching?
At IFOHER, we pray for strength for every person, who lost their life partner and bearing the pain in their heart forever.