Unfinished

by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

  My father got a standing ovation, at which point he started to cry. I’d been blinking my own tears away, acutely aware that it could be the last time we would ever celebrate an achievement like this together. Holding each other and with the help of the hosts of the evening, we slowly made our way off the stage.

  Dad lasted through the whole three hours of the program, a feat that almost defies belief given that he was so weak, but he did it. That’s who he was. When we got back to my parents’ hotel room later, he collapsed on the bed, unable to do so much as lift his arm to unbutton his shirt.

  When I look back at pictures and videos from that night, they crush me. Dad had always been like Superman to me. All my life, he had been able to do anything, including save countless people’s lives over the course of his medical career. He had been six foot one, energetic and robust, an absolute mountain of a man. To see how the disease ravaged him, how thin he was, how laborious his speech and movements were—anyone who has seen a loved one go through this kind of disease knows that there is nothing worse. It was the last time my father appeared in public. Two months later, he was gone.

  * * *

  WHILE HE WAS alive, my family never spoke about where Dad’s illness was inevitably leading, what we were all thinking and feeling. I’m not sure if that’s the right way to go through this kind of experience, but every family is different and that was our way. By the time he was at the end, I admit that I was prepared to let him go. It was terrible watching him become a shadow of himself. He was depressed and suffering. My big, strong father was reduced to a shell of himself, lacking the energy to express his anguish with anything more than a silent tear.

  When I think back on the final year of his life, I often regret not taking more time off to be with him. But that’s not what he wanted. He wanted me to work, to focus on the career he’d helped me build. Neither he nor my mom wanted my life to be interrupted or halted by his illness. Now I wonder why I listened to them. Why hadn’t we had those important conversations that families have when someone is dying? Why hadn’t my father and I talked about things we’d never talked about before? Why hadn’t I reminisced more with him about our family travels, and about the music he loved to play? And about one of his favorite subjects—my childhood? Recollections of mischievous young me never failed to bring a smile to his face. I think somewhere inside I just didn’t believe he would go. He’d been on the ventilator twice, in the ICU eight times, and he’d always survived. Why wouldn’t he continue to survive?

  My father died on June 10, 2013, two months before his sixty-third birthday. My initial reaction was a kind of irrational rage. How could you leave me? I wanted to yell at him. Why did you go? Of course I knew that he’d held on for eight years because of my mom, my brother, and me; I knew he wanted to make sure that Sid was settled in his life and I was moving ahead in my career and Mom was doing well in their new business. And of course I wanted him to be in a place of peace rather than to continue on in suffering. But still I was gutted by the loss.

  I didn’t want to feel my overpowering grief, so I walled myself off emotionally. In the weeks before and after my father’s death, our home was full of family and friends. Mom was hosting our whole family—my parents’ brothers and sisters, and all their husbands and wives and children—all of whom had come in his final days to say goodbye to him. And while Mom was hosting and making sure everyone had a place to stay, while she dealt with the details of the rituals that would happen in the days after Dad’s death, I sat numbly on the couch, unable to talk, unable to move.

  Dad died at around noon on the tenth, and the cremation was held at 4 p.m. To my astonishment, it seemed like the entire Hindi film industry showed up—actors, directors, producers, camera people, lighting people, hair and makeup and set designers and their assistants. I had no idea how everyone knew, but they did, and the support they showed me and my family temporarily pierced the walls I’d erected in an effort to protect myself from my grief. The walls were pierced again at the chautha, four days after his death. Over the course of four hours that day, it felt like a thousand people came to show their love and respect for my father. All of his life, his warmth, inclusivity, and joy had drawn people to him, and now, in addition to family, there were people from all of the parts of his life—doctors, patients, army friends and fellow officers, musicians. And the film industry was there again in a massive demonstration of support. Many of my colleagues knew him and had been touched by him in some way, and I’d like to believe that a good number of them were there not just for me, but because they genuinely grieved my father’s passing. Although I desperately wanted not to feel anything, it was hard not to look around and be moved by all the people who felt compelled to honor my father’s memory.

  The hole my father’s absence left in our family, in my heart and in the hearts of my mother and my brother, was almost unbearable. I was accustomed to always moving forward, always going on to the next thing rather than facing my feelings. From my perspective today, I see that it had been my method for coping with pain and grief ever since my boarding school days, and now, more than twenty years later, I was still doing the same thing. I had no tools, no internal mechanism, no experience that could help me deal with such devastation. Until then, my mother had never really believed in therapy, but after she went to a grief counselor, she advocated that I try it as well. Although I tried a few therapists, I never found one who was right for me, and for reasons I still don’t entirely understand and cannot explain, I did not pursue getting help from a therapist or grief counselor beyond those short-lived efforts encouraged by my mother—though I would have immediately advised any friend in a similar circumstance to do so. Instead, I turned to what I knew and felt I did best: my work.

  During the final months of Dad’s life, I was training to play the title role in the movie Mary Kom, a biopic about the gritty, self-made Indian Olympic boxer. In order to play her credibly, I not only had to learn who she was, I also had to thoroughly learn the sport and develop a boxer’s body. I trained for two to three hours every morning, practicing footwork, working with a punching bag, and sparring. In the afternoons I’d have another two-hour gym session to build my muscles and my endurance. In a certain way, the extreme physicality of playing an athlete was its own kind of release, helping me deal with all the fears and worries that go along with watching a loved one fade away in front of you. Five days after Dad died, the day following my father’s chautha, Mary Kom was scheduled to begin shooting, and although the film’s producer, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, offered to postpone the start date, the sense of duty and discipline I’d inherited from my father and his twenty-seven years in the military wouldn’t allow me to accept his offer. I was concerned that Sanjay Sir would take a hit on this small-budget movie, and I honestly felt it was my moral duty to show up.

  As always, work was my therapy. I put all of my grief and a piece of my soul into that character and that film. It’s what drove me and it’s what allowed me to continue functioning. I’d show up on the set each day prepared and focused on the work at hand, just as I always had been, but I was also slightly dazed and certainly numb. In a way, it was just the right movie for me at that time. It was so intensely physical that my numbness might have actually served me well.

  I was still living in the same apartment complex that my parents had lived in, and that my mother now lived alone in. We had separate units on the same floor so that we could all have freedom and privacy while still feeling connected as a family, and it was an arrangement that had worked well. During the weeks following my father’s death, when I came home exhausted, bruised, and aching after shooting the grueling boxing scenes, Mom would knock on my door and remind me to soak in a warm bath with Epsom salts to ease the muscle pain. And every night I would cry in the tub and think, I can’t do this. But in the morning I’d wake up and remember my father and how he’d willed himself onto that stage at TOIFA, how he’d willed himself
to hang on during those final, difficult years. And I’d think, I will do this. For him, I have to do this. Stiff and sore, I’d rise from bed to begin another day of work.

  My mother, Sid, and I all grieved in our separate silos. We didn’t cry in front of one another; we tried to be strong for one another. Mom went through a really difficult time, so difficult that sometimes I wondered if she would ever come out of it. My parents had been partners and sweethearts for thirty-two years, a true story of love at first sight that had endured through pain and loss and challenge as well as all the joy they’d shared. At the end, my mother was Dad’s wife, his friend, and his consulting physician even as she protected my brother and me from seeing the worst of his decline. I know it was traumatic for her, and I know it was lonely. Six months after Dad died, in December of 2013, Mom, Sid, and I took a family trip to Turks and Caicos. The time together, out of our normal environment, allowed us an opportunity to begin to talk about Dad’s death and our grief more openly than we had been doing. It was a small step but it was a step in the right direction, and I believe it allowed us all to feel just a little less alone.

  Beyond those few conversations with my family, though, I never really examined or dealt with my grief. Instead, I tried to power through. I was doing my best to be resilient, but the fact is that I was burying my grief rather than coming to terms with it. I moved from one extreme to another, like a pendulum, always in motion, always swinging. Either I was working long hours, moving fast, traveling, not giving myself time to think, or I was completely inside myself, shut down, uninterested in seeing friends or seeking company. Over time, I came to realize that my grief, rather than diminishing, had simply become an ever-present companion. Once I realized that it wasn’t going anywhere, instead of trying to distance myself from it, I allowed it to move in with me, as if I were a host, perhaps, and we were in a symbiotic relationship. I accepted that I would take it with me wherever I went, like I took my cellphone and my keys. Or perhaps like I took my determination and my loyalty, which are simply parts of me, as grief was, too, now. You might think this would be an impediment, but somehow the comfort of knowing that this grief, so personal to me, was like a priority item in the tuck box of my life allowed me to move forward. I knew it would always be there. It might change, evolve, become larger or smaller, but it would always be there. And this acceptance, it seems, helped me move forward.

  About a year before my father died, I got a tattoo on my right wrist while I was in Ibiza, Spain, recording part of my album there. Late one afternoon after we’d wrapped and had a few glasses of rosé, my manager and friend Natasha, hair stylist and friend Priyanka Borkar, and I decided that we would get tattoos together to commemorate our trip. I knew that I wanted something related to my father, which is how I came up with Daddy’s lil girl….That’s what he always called me, and how he addressed the cards he sent to me. It was the tattoo artist’s brilliant idea to have the words inked in my father’s own handwriting, so I called Dad and told him that I needed him to write those words out for me. I didn’t tell him it was for a tattoo; after seeing how he and my mother reacted to the belly button piercing I’d gotten when I was twenty-two, there was no question of what his response to a tattoo would be. So I lied and said that I needed it for artwork for my album cover. Dad was sick enough by then for it to be really hard for him to hold a pen—my coordinated, adept father, who had been such a skillful surgeon—but as always when I asked him for something, he made it happen. Mom told me that he practiced writing those words over and over again until he was satisfied. When I received the best of his efforts from Mom, it was perfect.

  Later when I showed the tattoo to him, I smiled sweetly and said, “Do you forgive me?”

  He laughed, delighted. “You tricked me! And of course I forgive you.” He is now on my wrist forever.

  * * *

  ALMOST THREE YEARS after my father died, in the spring of 2016, I moved from Montreal to New York to shoot the second season of Quantico. I imagined I might leave behind the sadness I was still feeling when I left Canada. Instead, I fell into a depression. While I thought I had powered through my grief, I was still carrying it with me, apparently keeping up my end of the deal to hold it close wherever I went.

  From what I understand, clinical depression is usually considered something separate from, or unrelated to, the sadness you feel when a loved one dies, so I don’t think I was clinically depressed. And I was fortunate to be able to continue working, which was my salvation. Still, the time felt like a never-ending slump, a long sigh of sadness, a sort of pause in my life that lasted almost two years.

  By the following year, 2017, I was deep into a period full of endings and loss. I was still living in New York; still grieving my father; still nursing a broken heart from a previous relationship; and shooting what would be the final season of Quantico. When I wasn’t actually on set or on location, I was mostly alone. I would eat by myself, watch TV by myself, and stay up well into the early-morning hours even though that meant I got little sleep. That was okay, given that the little sleep I got never seemed restful anyway. I put on almost twenty pounds. On social media, people made unkind comments about my weight; in texts, friends took me to task for backing out of the few plans for drinks or dinner that I had forced myself to make. Finally they just stopped inviting me. I couldn’t blame them, but I couldn’t seem to help myself, either. I had always been curious, optimistic, and full of energy. Now I went through most of my days and nights like a zombie, so much so that I don’t remember a lot about that time except that I felt numb for most of it. When I wasn’t feeling numb, I felt lonely, sad, and isolated. No one understood what was going on inside me, because I didn’t tell anyone.

  I’m not saying there weren’t a few bright spots, times when I delighted in the world around me. Mercifully, there were, and meeting Nick that year—however briefly—was one of them.

  Mostly, though, my days and nights felt gray. I tried not to share my struggles with my mom; I didn’t feel comfortable leaning on her when she was struggling, too. Instead, I hid my difficulties from her, which was relatively easy to do, since she was in India and I was mostly in America; we weren’t in the kind of close physical proximity where you can readily sense the shifts of mood and emotion in those you love. But I’m sure she probably had a mother’s instinct that something wasn’t quite right, no matter how much I tried to act as if all was well. I could sense it in her, after all.

  I was also dealing with the pressure of having to establish myself professionally all over again. I’d worked so hard to build one career in the Hindi film industry, then another in the music industry, and then a third in Hollywood. I was exhausted. I had never before felt so sad or weighed down that I couldn’t do anything beyond what was absolutely required, but that’s what I felt like for long portions of 2017. My asthma, which I’d had since childhood, got worse and my immune system weakened. I slept less and less. I was sick a lot.

  When Dad died in 2013, I had made half-hearted efforts to find a therapist to help me with my grief. This time, in a more paralyzed state, I didn’t even try. I should have. I didn’t consider medication. I should have. All I wanted was to spend time alone, until finally, finally, I was tired of being sad. It would be so simple if I could point to one specific catalyst for this change, but that’s not the way it happened. It took almost two years, but eventually I realized that some small inclination toward life inside me was tired of sitting on the sidelines. I tried to remind myself of who I used to be when I’d had a spark. After a long time, I realized that I missed that person. I wanted to be her again.

  Ultimately, I understood I was at another turning point in my life, another juncture where I had a critical choice to make: Was I going to remain in my despair and lose the career I loved and had worked so hard for, or was I going to bring back the spirit that I used to have each morning when I walked out the door thinking, This will be a great day. It ha
d been fun to be that person. I liked her. My work hadn’t been affected yet—I was thriving in my career—but I was tanking emotionally and I knew it was only a matter of time before that caught up to me professionally. I was not going to let all the good things in my life slip away from me because I was emotionally devastated. I was not going to give in to the darkness. I decided I had to choose myself, and I had to do it immediately. I knew it’s what my father would have wanted, and I realized with a jolt that I wanted it, too.

  Maybe it sounds simplistic, but I decided to focus on the blessings that I’d been given instead of focusing on what I was missing. I started to treat myself with kindness. I told myself not to blame myself for feeling alternately bereft and numb, for having indulged in such a long, quiet period of sadness. That’s what my body had needed, I realized; that’s what my spirit had needed—to mourn and mourn fully. To feel the sadness I hadn’t wanted to feel. I didn’t know exactly how to move from a world of gray back into a world of vibrant color, but one day I figured out one simple thing I could do: I could stop hiding and reengage with life. And that would require me to step out of my apartment.

  I spent New Year’s Eve of 2017 as I usually did those years, with my best friend, Tamanna, and the man she had by then married, Sudeep Dutt. After our conversation that night, the next day—the first day of 2018—I made a conscious decision to start doing small things to help me reengage with the world. When I returned to New York, I made an effort to reconnect with people—just a few at first—breaking my nightly pattern of coming straight home from work, for instance, and instead meeting a friend for dinner, or inviting someone over to hang. I found that I felt a great comfort in simply being in the company of friends, even when I didn’t talk about my problems; I felt less alone, less sad, less isolated. Once I started talking about what I was going through with people who cared, I started learning how to process my feelings.