Every now and then, I come across a post by a friend or acquaintance who has lost a parent.

Some are written in the immediate aftermath of the loss. Others surface months, sometimes years later.

What strikes me is that these posts are rarely just about reminiscing. They are about the little things that made their parent who they were. The quirks, the habits, the values, the contradictions. The things that stood out. The things they said, and sometimes, the things they never did.

Often, there is a line about what their mother or father would have done in a particular situation. Or what they might have said.

Some posts are accompanied by photographs. Some by music. And some with beautifully crafted videos that bring together fragments of a life.

There is grief. There is disbelief. There is longing. But there is also a certain poetry in how it all emerges.

Almost as if the depths of a life, imperfect as it may have been, are being stirred and brought to the surface. Memories, emotions, conversations, unresolved thoughts. A churning of everything that made that relationship what it was.

I have now had several years to process my own grief.

Sometimes I wonder whether, as the years go by, we begin to see a little more of our parents in ourselves. Or whether we find our own ways of walking paths they might have been happy to see us take.

Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

But the one thing that I have come to realise is that you become more forgiving.

You begin to see your parents not just as parents, but as people. People who were figuring life out as they went along. People who were navigating a world that kept changing, with a new set of challenges every decade.

They were learning, stumbling, making choices, sometimes getting things wrong, and trying, in their own ways, to hold it all together for the people they loved.

We sometimes forget that.

Life doesn’t come with a manual. It doesn’t come with an experience certificate. Our parents were first-time navigators too.

That is what time teaches us. To look back with a little more tenderness. To make room for the imperfections. To understand a little more than we once did.

We are all figuring this out as we go along.

This Diwali, as you light a candle for the loved ones you miss, remember them with tenderness. And remember, too, the kindness you deserve.