The Safety Pin of Love: A Lesson in Grief From My 9-Year-Old

Today, I am grieving.

My chachu passed away after a short and difficult battle with cancer. And yesterday morning, while I was still trying to process the reality of his absence myself, I had another difficult task, I had to tell my nine-year-old daughter, Nishka.

She cried.

It was a natural reaction. Just six months ago, she had met him hale and hearty. How does a nine-year-old comprehend that someone she saw laughing, talking and living his normal life only a few months ago is suddenly no longer here?

Then again, I am an adult, and I am struggling to comprehend it too. But somewhere in that conversation, something happened that I wasn't expecting.

I thought I was going to teach my daughter about grief. Instead, she taught me.

The Safety Pin of Love

After crying for a while, Nishka said something that initially left me completely confused. She placed two coins on the table and connected them by resting a safety pin across them. Then she slowly removed the safety pin and said:

“Today, the safety pin of love is broken. It connects family and friendship. But it will heal itself in a year, and then you will make a new family.” 

She placed the safety pin again on the coins.

I wasn't quite sure what she meant.

What was this "safety pin of love"? And what did she mean by making a "new family"?

Perhaps she noticed the confusion on my face, so she decided to explain it to me.

And the example she chose surprised me even more.

She asked me about my Bade Ma, who passed away when I was in college.

“How did you feel when Bade Ma died?”

“Broken,” I said. “Devastated.”

“For how long?”

I thought for a moment.

“Probably six months to a year.”

“Then what happened?”

I told her that slowly, life started moving again. I immersed myself in my studies. I spent time with friends. I returned to my hobbies. New experiences entered my life and, little by little, the grief became easier to carry.

“But I still miss her very much,” I told her.

And then I said something I have felt many times over the years.

“Sometimes, I feel like a little bit of her lives on in you.”

She listened to me and then said very matter-of-factly: “That's what will happen next year with Raju Nanu's passing.”

And I just looked at her. I was amazed.

Perhaps the Safety Pin Doesn't Mean Forgetting

The more I thought about her words, the more I began to understand what she might have been trying to tell me.

When someone we love dies, something really does feel broken.

Our families are made of invisible connections; relationships, conversations, shared histories, arguments, celebrations, phone calls, weddings, festivals and ordinary moments we never realize are precious until they become memories.

Perhaps those are the things held together by Nishka's imaginary "safety pin of love."

When one person disappears from that picture, the pin breaks. But maybe healing doesn't mean fixing it exactly as it was. And it certainly doesn't mean replacing the person we lost.

It means that slowly, almost without realizing it, life begins forming connections around that empty space again.

We return to work.

We meet friends.

We laugh without immediately feeling guilty about laughing.

We become interested in things again.

We make new memories.

The family grows, relationships change, children grow up, and life keeps expanding around the loss.

The person is still missing.

But eventually, the absence stops being the only thing we can see.

Perhaps that was Nishka's “new family.”

Not a replacement for the old one, but the family and life that continue growing around the people we carry in our hearts.

We Don't Really Get Over People We Love

I found myself thinking, If only I could be like her.

If only I could process this tragedy so simply and believe with complete certainty that a year from now, the safety pin would somehow repair itself.

But then I remembered my own answer about Bade Ma.

I never really “got over” losing her. I still miss her.

What happened instead was that my life became bigger around the grief.

There were studies and friends. Then a career, marriage, motherhood, passions, hobbies, responsibilities, dreams and thousands of ordinary days.

The grief didn't disappear. Life simply grew around it.

And perhaps that is one of the strange truths about losing someone. Healing is not forgetting. Moving forward is not leaving someone behind.

Sometimes it simply means learning how to carry their memory without allowing their absence to stop us from living.

My Little Krishna

And then, sitting there listening to my nine-year-old explain grief to me, another thought crossed my mind.

For those few minutes, she felt like my Krishna.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjun stands on the battlefield of Kurukshetra overwhelmed by grief, attachment, fear and confusion. He knows he must face what lies ahead, but emotionally, he feels unable to move forward. And Krishna guides him through that moment.

My battlefield, of course, was nothing like Kurukshetra. It was simply one of those inevitable battlefields that life places before all of us eventually, the loss of someone we love and the helplessness of knowing that there is absolutely nothing we can do to change it.

And there I was, struggling with my emotions, while my nine-year-old calmly walked me through my own past.

You have felt this kind of pain before.

You thought you were broken then too.

You still love and miss that person.

But eventually, you learned to live again.

And you will learn again this time.

There were no scriptures or philosophical explanations in her lesson.

There was simply a “safety pin of love.”

Yet somehow, it was exactly the wisdom I needed that morning.

For those few moments, she became my little Krishna, gently teaching me how to stand in my own battlefield of life. And I listened.

Sometimes Our Children Become Our Teachers

We spend so much of parenthood believing that we are preparing our children for life.

We teach them how to deal with disappointment, friendships, failure, love and eventually, loss.

But children have a way of looking at life without all the layers we adults accumulate over the years. Sometimes their explanations may not make perfect logical sense, but they reach somewhere our carefully constructed adult wisdom cannot.

That conversation did not take away my grief. I still miss my chachu. I still wish things had been different.

But something about Nishka's certainty made me feel a little more at ease. My heart, which had felt unbearably heavy that morning, became just a little lighter.

And I felt incredibly proud of her, not because she wasn't grieving, but because somehow, even while grieving herself, she found a way to make sense of it and comfort me.

Maybe years from now she won't even remember telling me about the "safety pin of love."

But I think I always will. Because on one of the saddest mornings of my life, when I thought I was supposed to help my little girl understand loss, she quietly reminded me of something I already knew but had temporarily forgotten:

We don't stop missing the people we love.

We don't replace them.

We carry them with us while life slowly grows around their absence.

And somehow, one day at a time, the broken safety pin begins to hold again.

Sometimes our greatest teachers arrive in unexpected forms.

Mine arrived that morning as a nine-year-old girl sitting beside me, reminding me how to keep going. ❤️