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 19th 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.
