To All Those Who Have Lost Their Mothers and Are Reading This….

For those who have lost their mothers, recently, or in the recent past, this eulogy by Ru Freeman for her own mother, on her website, which would strike a loving chord. I for one didn't realize what a big loss it would be to lose one's mother. More than anyone else in our lives, we take our mothers for granted. My mother was obsessed with death, a real necrophile; she talked to us in glowing and somewhat exaggerated terms of the many deaths she witnessed: the father she had nursed in his last days, her sisters whom she cared for in through her ultimate days, the neighbor whose death she witnessed (she breathed her last with "a big burst of breath, then nothing"), the caring she had done for her father-in-law, my grandfather, the many, many services she had done for the dying. But when it came to her own death, I am sad to say she didn't recognize me, she looked at me with unseeing eyes, didn't speak words of blessings (which she said she had received from the many dying people she served), didn't take the Lords name or sing a hymn and died with a few huge intakes of breath, with me and my sister beside her, nobody else. Immediately thereafter, as if on cue, the ants started attacking her, and I shifted her to a mortuary for her other children and relations to see her remains, her lifeless body.

Clinically, it was the passing of a phase in my life when I felt there was someone, somewhere, who will always be there, a presence which I will miss, an attachment like no other, a feeling of connectedness like no other. My loss. Our loss that is, to all who have lost their mothers and are reading this.