If there is an afterlife, I want to meet my mother

By P. Ramesh Kumar

“It’s over… she’s gone,” said a female voice on the phone. I froze with moist eyes for several moments that brought my life to a standstill, as I felt a twitch in my navel. My mother had just died in the intensive care unit of Apollo Hospital in Chennai and her congregation pastor’s daughter had broken the news to me when I was in my sister’s place, where I was
camping, for a shower and breakfast before catching up with the job of being my mother’s attendant.

That was a year ago, four days after I had gone to Chennai from Muscat on emergency leave to be with my mother who was in what was described as a ‘very serious’ condition following a coma triggered by blood pressure. The point was not the financial difficulty posed by the unscheduled trip to India and the medical bills, which was my retired father’s perception, or the operation I had to undergo reluctantly within five days of the passing of the most important person in my life. It was death itself – the most important fact of life, and my response to it.

I had forgotten life must come to an end – as it was more than 10 years since my brother-in-law (my only sister’s husband) had died and 25 years since my paternal grandmother had passed away. I loved my grandma as much as I loved my mom, what with her having brought me up for the first four years of my life.

The death of a stranger is quite different from that of a loved one. The former evokes sympathy for some time while the latter overwhelms. Lurking somewhere in the mind is the irrational thought that life is eternal for blood relatives.

As I received the news of Mummy’s death, a real big problem was suspending my disbelief. Only then could I function as the only son who had a lot of things to do – removal of the body (yes, that’s what was left of mummy now) from the hospital, the funeral, the death certificate and the condolence meeting. I had got into a funny state of mind wherein everything seemed irrelevant except the question what exactly has happened to Mummy. Yes, her health had been deteriorating, particularly in the past 11 months, but someone decided she leave it all and go to the land of no return.

Nobody could actually comfort me and some condolence messages admitted as much. With a sorrow that rankled and memories that were fresh in my mind, I had to come to terms with a loss that cannot be made up for.

The last look

In the graveyard, the pastor announced just before the coffin was covered and nailed completely, “you could all have a last look at ‘sister’.” I peered into the coffin that was open at the headside, with only the face visible, the face that belonged to a beautiful young woman, then a caring and working mother of two and later an emaciated diabetic. The face was stressed out in the ICU with pipes going into and out of it but now was somehow amazingly calm and contented.

Is it true that her time had come and I should release her from my consciousness? That she was just another human being who had to die precisely at the moment she breathed her last? Far from letting go, my thoughts were revolving around the face. One reason I had taken up a new job months before the death was the offer of annual passage to India that would have enabled me to see this face every year. Now, I’ll be left with the grave.

Although I wasn’t making a scene, relatives and family friends took it upon themselves to tell me I should be a source of comfort for my father and sister and control my emotions in front of them. In effect, they were doing what my mother had also done – prohibiting my breaking down in public. “You are a boy. You shouldn’t cry,” she would say. I was too young to ask questions but I had reservations about tears being gender-specific.

Well, if that wasn’t enough, my mother had the curious belief that the first rank was a boy’s prerogative. When she was told I was third in the class with the first two ranks being held by girls, her reaction was, “You are a boy, you can’t let girls get better ranks than you.” It was ironic, coming from a big girl, but that was Mummy, quite happy with what her society taught her.

Those were not our only disagreements anyway. Her God was Christian, mine was secular. Equally true was none of our differences of opinion diminished our love for each other. We often looked forward to arguing with each other.  I told my father, who was kind of surprised to see me come over immediately after knowing mom was in a coma, “There are not many threads that bind me to Mummy. Just one that left me with my navel when it was broken – the umbilical cord.”

God bless you Mummy, dying to see you if there’s an afterlife.

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