‘I decided to turn the pain of Meera’s death into hope for others’

By Daksha Dalal

WE HAVE all lost a loved one. Sometimes the cir­cumstances are unfair, unplanned, but rarely are they well before their time.

It’s even rarer when a parent has to attend the fu­neral of their child, but that’s what happened to me when my daughter Meera took her own life when she was just 25 years old.

Everything with Meera started so very well, and she became the daughter every parent would be im­mensely proud of. Bright, confident, studious, smil­ing, full of life and hope, she would have made an incredible wife and mother. She was an extraordi­nary daughter and sister, but how was the family to know that we would only have her for such a short amount of time?

The person I just described became a mere shadow of herself and all because she placed her trust in a boyfriend who should have protected her, cared for her, enabled her to be the best person she could be. Instead, he took all that was good about her and brought it within his own dark­ness. Over the course of their three-year relationship, Meera was beaten black and blue, choked, blackmailed, threatened, gaslit, and psychologically co­erced and tormented.

She descended into depres­sion, her mental health hung by a thread, and all the while her abuser manipulated her tender emotions and repeatedly threat­ened her family.

And then one awful February – just after Valentine’s Day – she resigned from her job, went to a department store to buy some items, wrote a suicide note, and hanged herself in her bedroom in the family home.

My Meera died five years ago and it feels like five minutes ago.

And so I was left with the dark­ness and a pain so real it goes to bed with me every night when I close my eyes. I decided I had to turn that pain into hope for oth­ers, to help those suffering from abuse and depression to reach out and get the help they need.

I turned to an author and human rights cam­paigner called Saurav Dutt to pen the memoir of what happened to my Meera. Between us, we set out to tell her story as it happened, with an eye to sign­posting those who have survived to get the help they need, to let them know they are loved and looked after; that their parents would do anything to bring them closer into the light.

The book would also serve as a source to help those coping with often unbearable grief. There is no code, no formula, to deal with unimaginable loss, but you have to start somewhere. You can only pray so much because somewhere in the still of the night, when you are alone with your thoughts, you have to find some way to put them altogether and push ahead and live again, for your own sake, for that of your family, for the other survivors who mourn with you every day.

By the time a reader has read this sentence, some­one around the world has either taken their own life or is thinking about it. By the time you’ve read that very sentence, someone has been on the end of an abusive encounter by a perpetrator who wants to beat them into submission, maybe even kill them. It doesn’t help that in our communities in particular, we don’t acknowledge the threat, or talk about it enough. But it’s happening and we owe it to our­selves to take it as seriously as we can. We must.

So, as the ones left with the heartache and memo­ries when our loved ones have passed too early, what lies in our future? We can light the path ahead and hopefully guide those who need help to find it. That’s what I hope our book does, and my Facebook group in honour of Meera can accomplish.

I would like to think that we can turn everlasting pain and sorrow into something inspirational and hopeful, that it’s always darkest before dawn.

I can only know this for sure in the years ahead – but if you’re out there and wondering if somebody is willing to listen to you, then let me tell you that we’re out there and we want to let you know that you are loved, you can be helped.

You just have to be brave enough to ask for it, and to persevere when the clouds come.