When You Cannot Fix It

Prakash is an engineer in Pune. He is used to solving problems. When his father had a stroke two years ago, Prakash read every article he could find. He found the best hospital and the best physiotherapist. He made charts of his father’s progress. But his father never fully came back. He can walk with a stick now, but he often does not recognise his grandchildren, and he sometimes calls Prakash by his dead brother’s name.

The father who is here and not here

Prakash’s father is the second kind of unclear loss. He is at home, at the dining table every day. But the man who taught Prakash to ride a bicycle, argue about cricket and do his own taxes is mostly gone. Prakash felt he had lost his father, and yet he could not grieve, because his father was sitting right there.

Prakash dealt with this the way he dealt with every problem. He worked harder. He changed doctors twice. He shouted at his wife when she forgot a medicine. He stopped sleeping well. He felt that if he only tried hard enough, he could bring his father back.

Too much control, and too little

A counsellor at the hospital helped him see a pattern. “Effort is a good thing,” she said. “But this is a situation that effort alone cannot fix. When people try to control something that cannot be controlled, they usually wear themselves out and become ill.”

She explained that there are two ways to get stuck. One is to give up completely and say that nothing can be done. The other, which was Prakash’s way, is to keep trying to fix everything, at any cost. The healthy place is in between: doing what you can, and accepting what you cannot.

Two circles

The counsellor drew two circles on a piece of paper. In the outer circle, Prakash wrote the things he could not control: whether his father would recover, how quickly, and what the scans would show. He also wrote down the past, and the opinions of relatives. In the inner circle, he wrote the things he could do today. These were his father’s speech exercises, his meals and medicines, and an hour of rest for himself.

Prakash put the paper on the fridge. When he felt the old urge to fix everything, he looked at it and asked himself one question: is this in the inner circle or the outer one? If it was in the outer circle, he tried to let it be.

Remembering what you have survived

The counsellor also asked Prakash about other hard times in his life. He remembered running the family shop when his father was first ill, getting through the loss of his job, and looking after his mother after her surgery. He realised that he had already lived through difficult, uncertain times, and he had managed them.

Remembering this gave Prakash a different kind of strength. It was not the strength to fix his father. It was the strength to keep going without a fix.

It is not your fault

Underneath Prakash’s effort was a secret belief. He thought that if his father did not recover, it would be his fault. The counsellor told him plainly: “The stroke is not your fault. His slow progress is not your fault. You are doing a good job in a situation that nobody could fix.” Prakash said that nobody had told him this before.

How it is now for Prakash

Prakash still takes his father to physiotherapy every week. But he no longer keeps charts, and he no longer shouts at home. On Sunday mornings, he and his father sit on the balcony and listen to old Kishore Kumar songs. His father does not always know who Prakash is. But he hums along, and for an hour, they are together.