Letter #6: the arithmetic of love and loss. Reading time: 5m.

Dear reader,

I hope you’re warm, well and at ease. 

I’m writing to you from Dubai and lately, I’ve been thinking about fear. 

Last month, an urgent errand forced me out of my research rabbit hole for the first time in weeks. I walked to the post office listening to songs a new friend had sent me, trying my best not to think. (I needed my feet to be firmly on the ground so I was doing my best to keep my head out of the clouds). But later, listening to Abu Araki reprimanding his wandering heart, I began thinking of grief. 

While most literature on grief tends to the poetic and profoundly agonising parts of it, little tends to the clumsy parts. Yes, grief hurts. But more than anything, it’s confusing. And even when the pain lets up, this confusion persists. For weeks, you wake up and spend every day feeling like you’ve skipped a step but can’t quite identify it. It’s a discomfort, a constant pebble in your mind’s shoe. 

In difficult times, I sometimes cope by defining emotions in mathematical terms. In an attempt to understand many complicated things, I create systems. The system of love defines it as a vector quantity; love has both a magnitude and a direction. We love people and we do things about it. We speak to them, we spend time with them and we point our love forward to build futures together. But what happens when this love is reduced to its scalar form? When you’re only allowed to feel its magnitude but have no where to point it? 

In the way that speed is the scalar cousin of velocity, grief is the scalar cousin of love. When someone passes away, we are robbed of the ability to direct our love at them. We lose a dimension. This dimension - the dimension of possibility - is what we mourn. This also explains why grief is not exclusive to death. We also lose the dimension of possibility when we part ways with lovers, when we let go of dreams and whenever a reality we held to be true is revealed to be otherwise. Mathematically, all mourning is the same. 

Defining grief helped me understand it, but it didn’t help me cope it with it. I still don’t have any major systems for this, but on particularly difficult days, I’d tell myself “the data you imported into your brain contained their presence for many years, allow it to adjust to their absence”. This was my way of learning patience. 

But even learning to cope with grief doesn’t shield us from its greatest tragedy: the tragedy of becoming guarded for the rest of our lives. This is where my systems and statistics failed me. The difficult truth is: whenever we love others, the probability of pain is present. The deeper this love is, the larger the risk of hurt becomes. Unfortunately, I have found no technical theorising that can change this. 

I’ve been trying to contend with this for a while; with the perceived inevitability of pain. I spent a lot of time trying to find a system that would allow me to minimise these risks. First, I thought that becoming very good at identifying all possible risks would spare me. But very quickly, the vigilance became exhausting (and ineffective). Then, I began to think that keeping my love at a minimum would allow me to operate at minimum-risk, but I am simply not the kind of woman that can cap her affections. The last option: abstaining from loving the people around me seemed like a terrible fate. So, I was forced to do the unthinkable: face the risk, feel the pain and tough it out. 

Hilariously, once I released my fear of it, my following encounters with this "doomed fate" were quite manageable. 

I will explain it like this: the first time my baby brother fell over as a toddler, he cried so much that he couldn’t breathe. This frightened me and I lived in fear of the day he would fall again. But soon, he fell again and cried less. He fell another time and cried even lesser. Eventually, he would fall, get up and continue without skipping a beat. 

The pain of the impact hadn’t changed between those falls. But I came to understand that the reason he cried so much the first time was mostly because the pain was new. He was frightened because he did not know if he would survive it. 

In the same way, the first time we experience the heartbreak of grief, the bulk of our brain’s response is to the newness. We don’t know if we’ll survive it. And when we do make it through, it makes sense to live in fear of that pain’s return. It makes sense to vow to not love so hard, to not dream so big or to not plan so far ahead. It makes sense to keep a constant eye out for the signs that it may be gearing up to strike again. But even without the effort of caution, the pain of your first grief can never repeat itself. Simply because you and your body now know that you can survive it. What broke you once can never, ever break you in the same away again. 

When I think of the bravest people I know - who are consequently also the happiest people I know - I see this particular bravery in them. The big dreamers; the ones who take risks and go out on a limb for their desires. They’re not letting their lives be defined by the fear of grief but have reduced grief to a minor inconvenience that may pass through them in the pursuit of what they desire. They are still discerning, they still learn from their mistakes and still make better choices each time but they don’t let the possibility of losing hinder them from wanting. They’ve faced grief enough times to know it’s conquerable and now, they can love freely and openly. 

I’m learning that becoming more loving will require bravery of me. There is a kind of strength that is needed for the tenderness I admire and yearn for the most. I would like to spend the rest of the year teaching myself more about this.

What would you advise me as I begin this journey? And what have you been thinking of?
Do write back. (Especially because it’s my birthday!)

Salam,
Dinan Alasad