Surviving Grief: A Superpower No One Asks For

The Indestructible Cape Of Grief

This is #ViewingRoom , a column by OTTplay's critic on the intersections of pop culture and life.

Rahul Desai

THE MODERN WORLD is rigged to normalise toxic positivity. Most of us are wired to show that we feel better than we really do. Social media blurs the lines between projecting and being. Over the years, I’ve been so conscious about falling into this trap that I’ve gone in the opposite direction. I’ve wired myself to show that I feel worse than I do. There are times when I’m perfectly content, but I refuse to trust the contentment. So I dial it down a notch. If my heart sings, my eyes hum. I smile instead of laughing; I tap my fingers instead of dancing; I nod instead of hugging. But I always know that I’m a little happier than the look on my face — like a clock that tells the time by being five minutes behind. Perhaps this emotional conservatism stems from a childhood in which any stretch of bliss was impermanent. No nice phase lasted long: peace between my parents, financial stability, my dad’s job, his sobriety, family friendships, hope. It sounds like a cliched sad-little-boy tragedy, but maybe it was.

Despite all the history, I felt different at the end of 2024. Not good-different. It wasn’t that I was playing down my emotions. It was that the emotions themselves were fading: I had started to feel uncomfortable with the person I’d become. The grief of losing my best friend in early 2023 had multiplied into something heavier. It had begun to dominate the rest of me. This grief — this intensity and insanity of being incomplete — was now my entire identity. I could sense that not everyone liked being around me anymore. My presence came with an asterisk; I was one-dimensional company. I didn’t always mention it, but perhaps I couldn’t hide the sadness. It was hard-coded into the way I spoke, wrote , moved, loved, argued and slept.

I couldn’t take a small walk without thinking of how he had infused in me a tireless passion for walking. I was the guy who used to take a taxi from the railway station to college (a five-minute stroll at best), but travelling with him turned me into a marching fiend. We developed an in-joke about how ‘physical suffering builds character’ and how ‘the post-tourism beers have to be earned’. I could see through myself in the mirror every morning. It was the look of someone who had let grief seep into every pore: every word, every gesture, every kiss and every preoccupied meal. My hair got greyer; others felt weighed down by the solemnity of my voice. I didn’t laugh not because I could smile, but because I couldn’t.

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I had become nervier around my partner; my parents put it down to general grumpiness. Earlier my personal essays were about my parents or my conflicted sense of companionship and romance, but every single one in the last 23 months was dominated by loss and yearning. I searched for grief in stories, even if it didn’t exist. I was starting to wonder if I’d be able to write about anything else again. Was my mind eternally altered to make sense of a broken heart? Was sadness going to prevent me from exploring other aspects of humanity? I was afraid that I’d be consumed by my melancholy — my desire for a posterity I didn’t ask for, my longing for a friendship I’d never know. There was no escaping it.

But I tried to escape it anyway. Travelling would fix me again, I thought. So that’s what I did. Instead of another solo trip, though, I decided to do a faraway volunteer programme so that I could meet new people. Maybe make new friends. Maybe grow a new personality. Maybe ‘snap out’ of the funk. The last time I had done this programme, I was a 25-year-old drifter who had lost confidence in himself. I wasn’t sure if I was likable enough, ambitious enough, compassionate enough, audible enough, adventurous enough. That week with foreign strangers — strangers who somehow stopped being foreign — made me like myself for the first time. It was a typical coming-of-age journey, the kind movies are made about. There were people who wanted to sit with me, talk to me, know me, eat with me; they saw a soft-spoken and shy young man in me when I was struggling to accept my own seclusions. I felt appreciated and admired by young and old people; the week changed my life. I expected to be rescued this time. I expected to be reacquainted with a self I had long forsaken. Perhaps I’d ‘move on’ and find that there was more to life than death, more to love than grief.

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On the long flight, I chose to watch Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story . I had been looking forward to this documentary. It was about how the actor who played the on-screen superhero mutated into a real-life superhero after being paralysed in a horse-riding accident. Nostalgia aside, I wanted to know more about Reeve’s courage, his activism, and his ability to continue with an amputated spirit. Yet, as my flight flirted with the stars, I could only be destroyed by one aspect of the documentary. It was the sight of comedian Robin Williams — Reeve’s best friend and an Oscar-winning actor himself — speaking on stage after Superman’s death. It was the affection in Williams’ tone, but also the shattered spark in his eyes. It looked familiar. A decade after the funeral, Williams would go on to reunite with his late friend. A popular actress mentions that if Reeve hadn’t perished, she was certain that Williams would still be alive. It was a sobering thought. Dying of heartache sounds better than it looks. For most of us, the process of dying begins the second we lose a loved one.

This theme continued at the programme. Something was following me. The setting was a snowy village in the middle of nowhere: between time-zones, between time itself. There were different accents, different degrees of warmth in sub-zero temperatures, different levels of anxiety and excitement. But the reminders did not cease. I bonded with a young Spaniard who took walks with me every afternoon. We spoke more than we didn’t — often communicating in semantic shards and silent doodles. I felt like I had known him for decades. I suspect he was surprised at how much I liked walking. I bonded with two British pensioners and basked in the automations of their 50-year-long friendship; they’d been buddies for so long that they had almost started to resemble each other (even if their football teams didn’t). I gatecrashed a core memory of theirs: the older one ‘announcing’ that he had decided to formalise the civil union with his long-time partner.

I bonded with two 60-something English women: inseparable best friends who loved their wine, men, gossip, stories and adventures. Their compatibility was infectious; they loved each other’s company and completed each other’s eye rolls. One could tell that they had seen the world together. They even taught me how to salsa. One of them christened me the ‘dark horse’ in the group (“not in a racist way, okay?”) because I opened up after a few beers. By the end, it had all become more of a reckoning than an escape. The thing following me, refusing to be left behind, was my grief. It wasn’t baggage I could opt to shed; it was like an extra layer of skin that sparkled in the vicinity of best-friend pairs, hikes and bars.

After the trip, two moments punctured my jetlag. A friend sent me an old video of Stephen Colbert in conversation with Anderson Cooper. Colbert had been my favourite talk-show host, and general thinker, since his speechless handshake with actor Keanu Reeves after Reeves’ answer to his question “What do you think happens after we die?”. It was a John Wick 3 promotional chat until the two men transcended the occasion with a fleeting exchange of truth. I could always tell that much of Colbert’s humour stemmed from a deeply tested perspective on life and suffering — and it was this perspective that Reeves’ lovely response (“I know that the ones who love us will miss us”) exposed. With Cooper, Colbert expanded on his relationship with “the gift” of grief. He spoke about how loss helps us connect with others who have lost, which in turn allows us to love and live more deeply.

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The timing of this clip felt uncanny. Colbert’s words revealed that I’ve spent the last two years bleeding so hard that I found a community of wounds to camouflage the blood. I’ve sought silent languages of pain at peer meets; I’ve understood text messages and sighs of others who lost the person I did. We got solace in fragmented bonds and unspoken gestures. This shared tenor of suffering made me vulnerable enough to travel in a way that allowed me to live deeply — and to embrace an authenticity I had distanced myself from. Just like last time, it urged me to accept myself and be confident about my complexities. The trip was filled with reminders of togetherness and walking. My YouTube algorithm often led me from Colbert to his Andrew Garfield interview — where Garfield tearfully hopes that the grief of losing his mom never leaves him. He feels safe with it. To see them talk so openly was to watch an open-heart surgery on life itself.

The signs that started with the in-flight movie never stopped. The second moment to puncture my jetlag came when I watched Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon . I fell in love with this Hindi movie about a group of small-town youngsters who start their own parallel DIY film-making industry of Bollywood parodies. It had everything, including social commentary and a wordless climax. But I couldn’t detail how personal it felt in my review. Perhaps I was saving it for now. Towards the end, there’s a transient scene where the director of the new Superman spoof freezes while filming. In front of him is the lanky superhero — his timid best friend — floating down the river on a tube. The shot is supposed to be a goofy recreation of baby Kal-El being sent to Earth on a spaceship-capsule.

The actor waves goodbye directly to the camera, the crew chuckles. It’s business as usual, except it’s not. All the director can see at this point is his old friend — now in an advanced stage of terminal illness — bidding farewell to the world. A reel goodbye evokes a real one. His mortality is immortalised by the camera. Up until then, the crew had churned out ‘commercial’ remakes as an alternative to the real thing; it was a source of many conflicts and crises. But in this moment, and during their movie premiere, it morphs back into the intimate friendship tale it always was. All the noise melts away; they remember the essence of their fictions. The framework might be that of a big Hollywood blockbuster, but the picture is theirs. The vision might be cinematic, but the eyes are theirs. Maybe the makers realise the significance of the Martin Scorsese quote: “the most personal is the most creative”. It made me wonder if Robin Williams would rewatch shots of the old Superman movies to reframe Reeve’s leaving, too.

I choked up during this scene. It was like watching the lens zoom in after years of focus-pulling. I thought of how I’ve been writing reviews and columns for more than a decade. Like the Malegaon movies, these pieces are derived from art that already exists. Somewhere along the way, it became a job: one that I cherish, but also one that depends on validation and opinion. It’s only in the last two years that I’ve discovered the art of ‘adapting’ other stories — to tell my own. All the essays about grief and friendship have perhaps been a way to immortalise him after he’s gone. Every time I mention him, I freeze for a bit and recognise the duality of art: I’m subconsciously crafting a shrine to him through a medium of public consumption. And the raw footage is mine to edit.

I sometimes imagine him reading this. I try to see his face while he does. I imagine ‘premiering’ the words to him before I post them anywhere else. Maybe he reacts. Maybe he tells me to focus on my parents and partner instead. And then it all makes sense. Even if I write about other things again, I’ll actually be writing about him. I’ll actually be owning the infinity of grief : the freedom to feel worse than I do and the license to love wider than I ever have. The signs may have started with an in-flight movie, but I’m still glancing out the airplane window and watching the irony of dissipating clouds. Here I was, trying to flee the everythingship of loss, but I only inched closer to my friend — high above the sky and deep into the screen. With every new essay, I’m recreating farewells, revising goodbyes and preserving the memory of him floating down a river and shooting into outer space. With every new trip, I’m collecting souvenirs of a future we forgot to enter.

Where to watch Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.

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