No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

Thus wrote CS Lewis in A Grief Observed after his wife died from cancer. I have thought a lot about these words while bearing witness to my friend’s grief at the sudden death of her mother.

One ordinary afternoon, she tells me of mother’s heart attack at a relatively young age and the pessimism of her Indian doctors. When she complains that her mind is in tumult, I counsel patience and offer to decode the medical reports while emphasising that I don’t want to be one of those dreaded “foreign” doctors second-guessing the treating team. Alas, we run out of time as the very next day I receive a tragic message: “Mum died. I am on my way to India.”

When I call, she is about to board a flight feared by so many immigrants: the long journey home to see a seriously ill, or worse, deceased parent. Her voice is hushed and dissociated, a world away from the upbeat, happy person I know.

My medical brain is in overdrive. Why did she arrest? Did anyone perform CPR? For how long? What kind of hospital was she in? What did the angiogram show?

A whole morbidity and mortality meeting jostles in my head but thankfully, sense prevails. I tell her I am sorry and slip in just one morsel of medical advice to assuage her guilt: no matter where people arrest, the outcomes are generally poor.

The next time I check in she describes her flight as unbearable, suffocated by her own thoughts. Stunned by the fragility of life, I can imagine neither her awful experience nor an adequate response. What I don’t know at the time........

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