The Mustard Seed

Her name was Kisa Gotami, and she was carrying her son. She had been carrying him for some time. She went from house to house asking for medicine, and the people at the doors looked at what she was holding and understood before she did, and had no way to say it. Some gave her something to make her go. Someone finally sent her on to the teacher staying outside the town.

He did not tell her the child was dead. He said he could make the medicine, and that he needed one ingredient: a mustard seed. Every kitchen in India had mustard seed. But it had to come from a household where no one had died.

So she went back along the same street, and this time she was asking a different question. Every house had the seed. No house could give it. We lost my husband’s father in the spring. Our eldest, four years ago. My sister — you knew my sister. She heard it at door after door, all afternoon, until the answers stopped being obstacles and became the thing she had come for.

By evening she understood what had not been said to her. She had believed her grief set her outside the human street. It was the one thing that put her fully inside it.

We do the same thing today, just with better lighting. We scroll past other people’s best forty seconds and conclude that we alone are struggling — that everyone else’s marriage is easy, everyone else’s career is on track, everyone else’s children are fine. It is the same street. Every house still hides its funerals; the doors are only better photographed now.

The seed never became medicine. It was never going to. What it cured was not the grief but the loneliness stacked on top of the grief.

When you are suffering, you are not being singled out. You are being let in.

Grieve. But do not grieve alone on top of it.