Day 811: The Undiscovered Country

Be careful what you wish for. Last evening, I complained inwardly that I’m always the last one to know my family’s goings-on, owing partially to the sheer geographic distance between us. Before turning in for the night, I called my parents to say Hello and got them as they stood outside the ICU of a Chennai hospital. After years of battling different forms of cancer, my aunt now had very little oxygen in her system and the prognosis wasn’t good. As I began to ask how bad it was, Dad abruptly announced, “She’s gone.” I demanded to speak with my mother. “Maitri, tell your brother. I have to see to your cousin,” she wailed into the phone as she threw it back to my father and disappeared into an imaginary hospital hallway. That was the second time my mother has shed tears as long as I’ve been alive, the first seventeen years ago when she feared my father had died after being taken prisoner during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

There, I was the first to know that my mother’s older sister had just died. Am I happy now?

Fall has been hard on our family for the last couple of years. D’s mother was taken by an uncontrollable cancer right around Thanksgiving of 2005. We lost my father’s brother to lung cancer the very next day. Last September, my father’s mother succumbed to old age. Now this. Falling leaves, shorter days, snow flurries — okay, I get it, life, enough with the damned metaphors already.

My cousins and their families fill my thoughts; to lose their mother, their only remaining parent, is unthinkable, even if it was best that she moved on without suffering any longer. I also wonder how my sweet grandmother is doing. Has she been told? No mother can bear to see her child go. What effect will this have on her health?

If there is anything for which Hinduism prepares a human, it’s death. More specifically, it teaches you how to accept death, be it your own or another’s, be it sudden or at the end of a long and fulfilling life. Death comes not as the end, but as a bend in the journey. I must not be a very good Hindu, or just an extremely selfish one, because the death of dear ones scares the living bejeezus out of me. All of the frustratingly irreconcilable but innately real aspects of living inside this bag of hydrated leather re-emerge and start running around in the aching brain once again – not wanting to let go, whether it’s fair or not, the abject lack of desire to see your family hurt and on and on. Immortality is not the answer, but must we be so fragile in life and in death?

So it is. May my aunt be free of her earthly bonds, pain, despair and fear. May my cousins and their children feel only comfort and support as they work through this hard time. With another member of the family moving on towards the end of November, I offer thanks for her having touched our lives for as long as she saw fit. If death hasn’t already schooled us in holding our dear ones closer, let this be the time. Om Nama Sivaya.