Sasi Kala's story

My name is Sasi Kala. I lost my beloved mother more than six months ago, but the image of her helpless body lying in her last resting place stubbornly appears every time I close my eyes. My mother was 86 years old; fit both physically and mentally until she was knocked down by a stroke. I was not there, but my family said they had found her naked, sitting in the corner of my brother’s bedroom. They could not tell me what made her take off her clothes and how long she was sitting there before they discovered her. And since she had lost her ability to speak, she could not explain what had preceded her stroke.

I saw my mother a week after the incident. She was hospitalized and was fed only liquids through a tube. She had no facial expressions from which to guess what was going on inside of her body (or mind).

People say that she lived her life (she was 86 years old) and that I should try living mine. Even my own family, my siblings included, says that she was lucky to go after only a few weeks of suffering. But I protest, “she should not have had to suffered at all, not even for a day”. My mother was a woman of high morals. She helped everybody she knew throughout her life. “What’s the use of helping others?” I cried. I asked God, “Where was her reward for limiting herself and giving all of her energy and possessions to others?”

I had never seen anyone dying until this time. I had prayed God to never let me witness any of my family members dying in front of me, and until then, God had granted my wish. But now I was reversing my prayer. Now, I asked the same God to let my mother go to heaven in peace. It was too painful for me to watch my own mother lying lifelessly on the hospital bed with a feeding tube in her nose and a breathing mask over her mouth. By the time I reached her, her lungs were already infected with pneumonia and I knew that she would never recover. Her condition was more acute than I could take. It was unbearable for me to watch my vivacious mother lying there helplessly and suffering!

I knew my mother was losing her strength, as my siblings had reported to me before the stroke. They told me that she had started to compromise her activities, gradually ceasing her daily walks and social visits. My mother loved meeting people and always kept herself busy doing things for others. I was especially alarmed when my brother told me that she had not cared to attend her own grandson’s wedding a few days before the stroke. My mother had been anxiously awaiting this particular grandson’s wedding day.

But when I had talked to her on the phone a few weeks prior to her stroke, she gave me no indication of a deteriorating memory or loss of interest in life. We talked about her health and she asked me about her favourite son-in-law (my husband) and grandchildren (our children). Then, she began talking about her distant past, rather than what was happening in her current life. But I didn’t give this much thought, thinking that she was simply recounting fond memories of past.

My mother was a super-woman. She was truly a rare breed. She was practically a child- 12 years old- when she married my father, who was 30 at the time. It was an arranged marriage and the age difference was not too unusual in that time and culture. My father was a tall, handsome, and shrewd man. He carefully calculated all of his words and said only a few things that made a lot of sense. My mother, on the other hand, was a small-framed woman, short, very smart, but not shrewd. She pretty much did what her heart told her to do!

My father was also big on work ethic and believed that children should be strictly disciplined. He never beat me. He did not have to. One harsh look from him was enough to put me in a cold sweat. So, I always told him the truth. However, I witnessed my father beating my brothers a few times. He used to tell them, “look me in the eyes and tell me you did not do this”, when detecting that they had lied to him. My brothers did try cheating him a few times, but were always caught.

My parents had a large home with a huge courtyard set behind a flower garden. The courtyard was bricked and fenced in on three sides by low walls. Beyond the low brick-walls were white belly-flowers (called jasmine in the West). There were other flowers also: gardenias, brightly colored roses, lilies, and so on. Beyond that garden were fruit trees. Then there were the tall exterior walls surrounding my parents’ property. My father designed this landscape by himself!

Behind their house, they had a few acres of very fertile land. When I was growing up, my parents had a caretaker family living in their house. This family planted all kinds of vegetables on the land. They gave my parents plenty of vegetables, kept some for themselves and sold the rest for money. However, their major crops were corn and soybeans in the fall and mustard plants in the spring. Mustard oil was the main source for cooking oil back then; corn and rice were staple foods. They threw a few radish seeds here and there in the mustard field, so the land looked like a garden, full of bright yellow mustard with purple-bordered white radish flowers stretched over a few acres of land. I still remember people visiting the field in the autumn to take pictures. One spring we even had a film crew shoot a short video in our fields for a movie, though I don’t remember the name of that movie now.

Growing a flower garden was one of my father’s favorite hobbies and I helped him tend it. My brothers kept the courtyard clean. My father was very proud of his ‘creations’ – his three sons and his properties. He watched my brothers playing soccer for hours in the courtyard with half a dozen of their friends from the neighborhood. I remember my father proudly declaring “I bought this big house for my 3 sons. When they grow up, they don’t have to build another home. Each can take one floor and raise their children side by side”. He said all this in the Nepali language, of course!

My parents had six children together. We all went to school. My mother got very little help from us with her household chores. She also raised a few cattle when I was growing up. She got up at 4 am and went to bed at 8 pm. She worked like a machine and never complained. She was also very inquisitive and crafty. She was a quick learner and took interest in just about everything she came in contact with. And, she was not afraid of undertaking any new adventure. For example, one year she knitted sweaters for us from the sheep slaughtered at our house. She had woven mats from the hay grown in our field, after seeing how one of her neighbors had woven hers. My mother also used to sew our clothes. She did more than I can describe here. My husband thinks I exaggerate about my mother’s abilities. But I don’t!

My mother always carried something with her when she visited people and urged us to do the same. “One should never visit someone empty-handed”, she used to tell us. She took a lot of pleasure from distributing her belongings to everyone who needed them. One Christmas when my mother came to visit us in Canada, one of our relatives told her, “everybody took advantage of your giving except me. There is no one in your family or in the neighborhood who did not get something from you.” She was known for her generosity.

My mother’s death is still too raw for me to bear. I’ve lost many nights of sleep and have burned with regret during the last six months. Knowing that I can’t change my past, I’m now trying to channel my thoughts to a more constructive path. I’m on the Internet 24/7 to keep me occupied (its helping me a lot!). I’ve also renewed my library card and have started to check out more books. I’m reading books that are mostly spiritual in nature: the courage to give, to give it up, how to forgive when you can’t forgive and infinity in a box, to name a few. I’m also determined to do what I can to make my mother’s wishes come true. She fulfilled her responsibilities and now I’ve to fulfill mine, I have concluded. With these thoughts I’m trying to let my mother rest in peace.

She is gone, but her voice calling me “sasi” (my family nickname) is still there, sharp, in my ears. She spoke fast and clear. I never found her confused or absentminded. She was a product of the early 19^th century, but her thinking was very contemporary. She worshipped ‘her God’ but she believed in a self-help philosophy, rather than depending on God to make things happen. She used to ask me why my children were postponing marriage and when I said, “marriages are made in heaven, mom, their time has not yet come,” she would say “you’ve to bring that time- don’t let them wait too long.”

My mother did not come to me in my dreams, or my siblings’ dreams, for about a month after she died. Then she started appearing. In my dreams she always looks 35-45 years old, not 86. My siblings say the same thing. We wonder why she has not aged in our dreams.

My siblings and I see our mother in her ‘own house’ doing things as she used to when we were growing up. Her life was so intertwined with that house. This was the first home my parents had bought after separating from their own parents. My mother spent most of her youth (and energy) in that house. Although we were all born elsewhere, with the exception of my younger sister, that was the house we grew up in. My mother had also welcomed her three daughter-in-laws and half a dozen grandchildren in that house. She was proud of her home! My parents had rented out two flats out of the four in the house, and she used to tell us proudly “all of our tenants bought their first home while they were still renting our flats”. She strongly believed that her home had brought good luck to the many people who resided in it.

In my dreams, my parents’ house represents them. Before my father died, I used to see this house shaking and almost falling down. I had heard that my father was deteriorating fast. My family knew that he was not going to last much longer and they had made me aware of this. In those days, I remember going to bed and praying to God to please not let me see ‘the house’ fall. I never saw the house fall down completely- nevertheless my father died, and a decade later the house also fell apart for everyone to see.

I thought I knew what grieving means. I had mourned the loss of my father, father-in-law, sister-in-law, uncles, aunts and a few others. Losing someone to death was hard; I had gone through the grieving process many times. But this death is different. This one is teaching me the true meaning of death. Only now have I realized that I’ve lost my empathic listener, authentic well-wisher and the one who truly loved me. I now know the true meaning of grieving. For the first time in my life I’ve realized that grieving includes regrets that one can’t do anything to erase.

I regret the things I could not do for my mother (or the things I did, which I should not have). She knew I loved her and that my love for her was not contingent on her material wealth. She lived with one of my brothers and had a good rental income of her own, so she did not have to depend on anyone financially. However, she had a piece of land that she used for growing fruits and vegetables to give away to those who did not have any. This land was taken away from her a few years ago, and though I made considerable efforts to get it back for her (compromising my relationships with my siblings), I was not successful.

My mother also talked a lot about celebrating her “chaurasi”. Chaurasi is the Hindu occasion for when someone reaches 84 years and performs a series of pujas (worship) and gives away clothes, food, etc. (dhan) to 84 others. My mother believed that this was one of the most important steps for her to attain moksha (heaven) and break the cycle of life and death. I had tried organizing the chaurasi for her, but was not successful, either. Retrospectively thinking, I should have tried harder- why didn’t I?

 
A lot of people say that they would not change a thing even if they could (A lot things different by Kenny Chesney), but I would if I had one more chance.