A pilgrimage with no blessing
When grief arrives dressed up as logistics
We know, somewhere quiet and unsentimental, that the body will not recover. The numbers don’t lie. The pauses in the doctor’s voice are loud enough. The truth is already sitting beside us.
And still, we begin.
We call hospital after hospital. We ask about specialists, experimental procedures, clinical trials, miracle margins, second and third opinions. We collect names the way pilgrims collect relics. We make lists, compare survival rates, and calculate timelines as if arithmetic could bargain with mortality. Each consultation, each consent form, each name on the spreadsheet is a rosary bead: we did not surrender lightly, we did not surrender lightly.
From the outside, it looks like denial.
It isn’t. It’s a pilgrimage.
Not one walked with incense and prayer, but one made of hold music and waiting rooms and consent forms that smell of antiseptic. We move through those motions the way mourners circle a pyre before the flame is lit—not because we believe the fire won’t burn, but because the circling steadies the heart.
The mind can register a prognosis in a single sentence. The body cannot metabolise it that fast. It needs steps. Corridors. Paperwork. Time. These motions are not about avoiding the outcome. They’re pacing. Letting reality drip in like saline instead of a sudden immersion in cold Ganga. Titrating our own suffering. Meanwhile, grief has already begun its quiet work: assembling, from test results and medication charts and the particular way the nurses stop meeting your eyes, the shape of what will soon be absence.
We learn the medical terms. We sit with doctors who speak carefully, nod at explanations we barely absorb, and temporarily become fluent in the language of prognosis. We’re not always looking for a cure. We’re negotiating with finality. We’re building a story we can live with later: We tried. We showed up. We stood guard.
Action builds scaffolding around what cannot be held. It gives our hands something to do while our insides rearrange themselves around what is coming. These motions allow love to take the form of labour.
Finally, the inevitable stands in the room. It has a face we’ve seen before. We’ve been walking toward it, step by reluctant step.
We call it trying everything.
So when we finally let go, we’re not less broken. But we’re not ambushed.
This draft has been sitting in my notes for over five years.
This past week, I’ve been watching my family move through these motions again, walking in and out of waiting areas and ICUs, carrying hope thinner than gauze.
The distance between writing and living has collapsed. So this leaves my notes and enters the world.
Share it with someone who needs it.