Memories

Grief, Addiction, and Two Years of Holding on to Sana’s Memories Today, the publisher in India sent Sana’s photo book for printing. A simple message. Yet it felt emotionally overwhelming, because it took me two years to create a lifetime of memories. Two years of looking through photographs, messages, videos, and pieces of a life that once filled every corner of mine. Two years of stopping and starting again because grief is not something you “complete.” It lives beside you. Some days quietly, and some days so loudly that even breathing feels exhausting. Creating Sana’s memory book made me think deeply about grief and addiction. What is addiction, really? Is it simply weakness, as society often labels it? Or is it sometimes the human mind trying desperately to survive unbearable pain? People often judge grieving individuals for how they cope without understanding what grief does to the body, mind, and soul. Addiction is not always obvious. Sometimes it is alcohol or medication. Sometimes it is endlessly scrolling through photos because you are terrified of forgetting a face, a smile, or a voice. Sometimes it is mindlessly watching Netflix to avoid silence. Sometimes it is staying in bed because the world outside feels impossible to face. Grief itself can become consuming. You hold onto memories because they are all you have left. While creating this book, there were moments I found myself unable to continue. A single photograph could unravel me for hours. There is something profoundly painful about realizing that the moments you once lived are now memories you are desperately trying to preserve before time softens their edges. How do you place someone’s entire existence into printed pages? How do you summarize love, laughter, dreams, and presence into captions beneath photographs? You cannot. And yet I tried. Because creating this book became more than a project. It became an act of resistance against forgetting. A way of holding onto Sana in the only ways still available to me. Sana was also deeply intuitive about others’ emotions and pain. She had a quiet sensitivity to people around her—often sensing what others were feeling even when they did not say a word. That intuitive understanding of others’ inner worlds feels even more present in my memory of her now. Grief has also changed the way I see others. Living with this level of pain makes you intuitively recognize suffering in people around you. I notice it in my students, in their silence, disengagement, exhaustion, or emotional withdrawal. Pain teaches you to see beyond behavior and into the hidden emotional worlds people carry. Society often tells grieving people to “be strong.” But strong for whom? Why are people expected to carry unimaginable pain quietly so others feel comfortable? It is easy to judge coping mechanisms when you have never experienced this depth of loss yourself. But grief changes the way you move through the world. Sometimes it feels like living inside a black-and-white photograph with no desire left to fill it with color again. Today the book goes to print. But grief does not end with printed pages. Neither does love.