Your musings on death lead me to think about my mothers`s death. She died when I was 26. We are taught by our elders to use euphemisms such as so and so passed away or so and so left her body , certainly to soften the blow for us and for them. But when it happened and even though I had loads of baggage to persuade myself otherwise, it was death - a huge absence, the emotional, psychological and physical space which she had filled was suddenly empty - and that emptiness was death. It was alive and like some animal's maw seemed to swalllow up everything around me but unlike life it was devoid of sense.How does one come to terms with death? I don`t think one comes to terms, one can`t. What happens though is that time like a clumsy surgeon botches up your wound and sometimes the stitches can hurt awfully.
I was living in a hostel and my exams were literally around the corner when she died. After getting back to my hometown and attending her cremation I heroically went back to write my exams out of an absurd sense of duty. I was told , " Your mother would have wanted you to." I travelled back with the biggest wound that life had dealt me until then, though I must say I had not been spoilt, uncomprehending, shrouded by a sense of complete abandonment and isolation, (though my university friends had come with me to provide succour), to study meaningless sentences such as , " While CLT implies the lessons are more
student-centred, this does not mean they are un-structured." What are these values that society , our parents impart to us and their parents must have imparted to them whereby the importance given to things are so unequal as to be monstrously absurd ? I walked around the campus in a haze and one day while I stepped out of my room I saw a short, portly woman walking ahead of me down the verandah wearing a striped, violet Bengal cotton sari carrying a towel and a soap case. My mother had often worn the same sari at home. I followed her blindly until something in the blackness of my being grew conscious that the lady in front was not my mother.
One day I broke down in front of my literary criticism lecturer, a young, intense, funny adult with a monkey like face. I told him that I had rejected abstractions and had no faith, no belief system to pull me out of this incomprehension. I didn't know where she had gone, what had happened to that life which was so dear to me. I was drowning. He told me, " But you don't have to have faith. You don't have to grapple with abstractions. The world is an eternal cycle of death and rebirth. The ashes of your mother's pyre has mingled with the air and the sea, it has gone back to the earth nourishing it, helping new life to germinate. Look at the grass, the plants, the trees around you. Her body helps them to grow, her life courses through their veins." And that staunched the wound, the leaching out of meaning. It is not that after this incident I stepped on an escalator and briskly rode towards relief but that I took the first painful step towards reconciliation. As I said time is a clumsy surgeon but a surgeon nevertheless.
Years have gone by since her death. I am 42 now. I can talk about her without a sense of guilt, pain, frustration giving rise to tears in my eyes. I don't wonder anymore where she has gone. Maybe there is no place to go, I don't know. I will never have answers. What I am glad about is that her death did not rob me of my love for her because had I not stopped grieving at some time the very intensity of the grief would have turned me against her.
Arunima
