Prerana’s story
Prerana and Prithvi
Prerana shares how she is learning to deal with the death of her older brother Prithvi.
Prerana was 17 years old when brother Prithvi died aged 21. He left home one day and never returned.
“There was a fight, which was on my graduation day from High School. I was 17 and that was the last time I ever saw of him. He left home after the heated argument with my parents and I never saw him after that.”
Prerana and her family spent a year thinking Prithvi was missing before they discovered he had died 10 days after he left home.
“That whole year was quite confusing and traumatic, so we had to put up on our walls and try to protect the family in case he did want to come back.”
“We had no idea. We had the cops search for him, and we had a lot of people come in and morph his pictures and say they had found him and can we get some money.”
“What we found out was that he passed away 10 days after he left. It was really sad to hear all of it. He basically left home with just one pair of clothing and no money. He felt like he was a burden, and he felt like he was deserving of not wanting to live anymore.
“My parents told me a year later that they found him on the railway tracks in a distant town far away from home. But we don’t really know if it was suicide or if it was a mistake. We don’t know anything; we just know he passed 10 days later.”
“It felt like there was no closure at all. He just left home and never came back. “
In the years that followed Prithvi’s death, Prerana’s said her family struggled to come to terms with what had happened and didn’t talk about their emotions.
“I felt completely alone. I didn’t have time to grief, I didn’t have time to understand what was happening. It also meant I lost my parents the same day because they stopped being themselves. The whole concept of family was gone.”
“My father went into alcoholism after that. Everyone’s walls just started breaking in the worst ways possible.”
Growing up, Prerana and her brother were really close. They used to share the same room and she always looked up to him.
“It was always my brother and I; he was a big influence on me growing up in terms of everything I like now. We bonded over music, or food, or art, and I would say a lot of influences from him are still really dominant now.”
Prerana said she didn’t really have any support for the first five or six years. It wasn’t until she went to therapy that she started to get support to deal with her grief.
“That’s when I realised that grief is not linear, and you don’t know when it hits. It comes in waves, so I can’t say that I have fully healed. It’s an ongoing process that I’ve accepted will be a part of my life forever so that has made it easier.”
She shares this advice for anyone who is also grieving for their brother or sister.
“You don’t need to immediately and distinctively be the strong one or put up these walls. Allow yourself to be vulnerable and to process those immediate emotions. As okay as it is to love someone profoundly and openly, it is also as okay to grieve their absence.”
“That’s something I didn’t do very well. I thought I had to be strong, and I completely shut it off. But that does break at some point. So, I would say be accepting of our own self and allowing for whatever comes.”
