Rohit

Age 34 years · How books helped him slow down, heal, and grow after a personal tragedy.

Two years ago I lost my younger brother in an accident. He was twenty-eight. I am not going to write about the grief itself —I don’t have the words for it, and I’m not sure I should try. What I want to talk about is what happened in the months after, when I was trying to find a way to still be a person in the world.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus at work. I couldn’t sit through a conversation without feeling like I was watching it from the other side of a glass wall.

A colleague gave me a book —just handed it to me one day without much explanation. It was a memoir by a man who had experienced devastating loss and had, somehow, built a life afterward. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis was written after his wife’s tragic death as away of surviving the “mad midnight moment”.I started reading it that night mostly because I had nothing else to do.

Something shifted. Not dramatically —there was no sudden lightness, no revelation. But for an hour, I was inside someone else’s experience of pain, and it was a pain that had a shape I could recognize. For the first time since the accident, I didn’t feel entirely alone in what I was carrying.

I started reading more. Memoir, mostly, but also fiction. I found that stories gave my mind somewhere purposeful to go during the hours I couldn’t sleep. They slowed me down —and I needed slowing down, because I had been running from stillness for months.

My brother loved cricket and bad films and making everyone laugh. He was not a reader. But I thinkhe would find it funny and also fitting that books are what helped me find my way back. He always said I was too serious. Maybe this is just me, finally, sitting still long enough to feel things properly.

I still read every night. It’s not a cure for anything. But it is a door I can open when the rest of the world feels shut.