Primalsoup

Five years ago, fifty-five days after my mother passed away, I made a video I never planned to share. This is what I understand now, watching it again.

Grief doesn’t announce itself. It brews tea. Lights incense. Scrolls Instagram.

Five years ago, fifty-five days after I lost my mother, I made a short film.

It wasn’t meant for anyone but me. No tribute montage, no photos, no tears cued by violin. Just shots of my new home, a place she never lived in, but which still somehow carried her weight, and a few seconds of faint Carnatic music playing in the background. I narrated it quietly, in one take, not caring about delivery or polish. I just spoke.

I called it Without Her.

In it, I talk about the things I had started doing since she left. Lighting a lamp every morning. Buying flowers. Cooking, badly. Attempting embroidery, which she always made look easy. I filmed the room I’d filled with her things , her sewing machine, her books, her glasses, even her talcum powder. I scrolled through her iPad. I followed her favorite artists. I tried to feel what she might have felt.

At the time, I didn’t know what the video was. It wasn’t grief therapy. It wasn’t memory work. It was just something to dowith my hands and my voice, at a time when language was failing and rituals felt hollow.

And now, five years later, I’ve watched it again.

What struck me most wasn’t the sadness, though that’s still there, a soft hum beneath everything. What caught me off guard was the clarity. The quiet way I was already trying to reassemble myself. The absurd routines I clung to. The ways I kept her alive without calling it that.

Grief was a verb back then. Now, it’s more of a layer. It doesn’t interrupt my days like it used to. But it underlines them. It’s in the rasam I still make. The lamp I still light. The impulse to buy flowers I know she would’ve scolded me for. The way I still don’t refer to her in the past tense unless absolutely necessary.

There’s a word I used in the video: mal’kosh – the Hebrew word for “last rain.” It’s only in retrospect that you realize it was the final one of the season. That metaphor still holds. I didn’t know her birthday that year would be her last. Or that her voice notes, her text messages, her jokes about turmeric and WhatsApp conspiracies, those would be the last versions of her I’d get.

But I look back now and realize: I wasn’t just recording loss. I was recording adaptation. Resistance. Ritual. I was building a space for her, not a shrine, but a place where she could stay in small, stubborn ways.

I made a video. I didn’t know I’d return to it.
But I’m glad I did.