Priyanka Chopra Jonas: Never really examined or dealt with my grief

Priyanka Chopra

In her recently released memoir, Unfinished, actor-producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas has revealed she fell into depression following her father's death, for around five years, till she made a conscious decision to get out of it.

The actor's father, Ashok Chopra, a physician in the Indian Army, died on June 10, 2013, after a long battle with cancer. Chopra says she used work as therapy, putting her grief and "a piece of my soul" into the sports drama, Mary Kom (2014). "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 27 years in the military wouldn't allow me to accept his offer. Work was my therapy. I put all of my grief and a piece of my soul into that character," the actor has written in the memoir, published by Penguin.

Chopra also acknowledges her Krrish co-star Hrithik Roshan, who in 2005-06, "used his connections at Air India" to arrange for her father's immediate flight to London from where he was transferred onto a flight to New York for further treatment at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

After her father's death, she says she didn't want to feel her overpowering grief, so "I walled myself off emotionally". She adds this had been her method for coping with pain ever since her school days. Her mother, Madhu Chopra, also a former physician in the Indian Army, advocated the actor talk to a counsellor. Although she tried a few therapists, she says she never found one who was right for her. The family, she says, tried to make sense of the grief on a trip to Turks and Caicos in December 2013.

"Beyond those few conversations, 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." Almost three years later, she moved 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."

After months of cancelling dinner plans with friends, she spent New Year's Eve of 2017 at a friend's place. "I didn't know exactly how to move from a world of grey back into a world of vibrant colour, but one day I figured out one simple thing I could do: Stop hiding and re-engage with life."