Anecdotal

In the Memory of My Mother

October 14, 2015

“Our sincerest laughter, with some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”.

      Percy Bysshe Shelley 

My Mother and My Son (30.11.2013)

On a day in the second fortnight of September 2015, my mother was wheeled into the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital in the city. She lay there for a week, entangled in a maze of tubes and wires that sprouted from all over her withering body. The equipment  attached to her kept birring, blinking and beeping. Doctors visited her at regular intervals. Nurses and technicians hovered over her dying body. They pushed in and pulled out a plethora of probes and needles. When her emaciated hands became swollen after too many needles went into it, they turned to her bony legs. They still did not find enough area for the needles since she actually did not have two legs. Nourishment in fluid form was occasionally poured down a tube inserted through her nose. Other patients moaned and groaned around her. But she lay there not seeing, not knowing and not caring. The regular convulsions of her body while she struggled to breathe through the oxygen mask were the only sign of life in her.  

The visitors and ‘bystanders’ of the patients in the ICU sat on the rows of cold metallic chairs laid out in front of it. Most sat with their heads bent down and eyes closed, lost in the depths of their mournful musings. The dreadful stillness in the air outside the ICU was broken at times by a hushed conversation, muted sob or mournful sigh. Many had been sitting there for weeks, hoping and praying that their loved ones lying inside would get well and come out of the ICU alive. But a few of the occupants of the ICU, like my mother, would not witness another silvery dawn or golden sunset.

Occasionally, one of the swing doors of the ICU opened a bit and the head of some nurse popped out through the slit. She would call out the name of a patient inside the ICU. Someone would suddenly get up and hurry to the door. The nurse mostly needed supplies from the pharmacy or hospital canteen for the patient. On rare occasions, a relative of the patient would be taken inside. It signaled serious danger. The patient concerned might be about to die or already dead.

We knew from the feedback given to us by the medical team that our mother was fighting a losing battle. It was only a matter of time before the end came. So, members of the family took turns to keep a constant vigil outside the ICU. Whenever the nurse called out the name of my mother, I panicked. My heart raced, my head throbbed and my vision blurred…

Four times a day, at the scheduled hour, the drapes behind the glass windows of the ICU were pulled aside. This triggered a sudden rush of people dashing for the windows. People pushed and shoved in a desperate attempt to catch a glimpse of their loved ones lying inside. Many of the patients in the ICU did not open their eyes. Many others with their eyes open did not see or recognize the faces peering through the glass windows…

When the drapes were pulled aside at eleven in the morning, each patient was allowed one visitor. The issue of who among the many had the privilege to enter that day might have been settled in advance by those concerned. This person would be taken close to the patient’s bed. After a couple of minutes, the drapes came back to shut the visitors out of the view within the ICU, the visitors taken inside came out and the crowd leisurely returned to their seats or quietly left the premises …    

After the drapes came back concluding the ICU ‘visit’ at seven in the evening, it would stay in place until seven next morning. Yet, the bystanders stayed put in their seats in front of the ICU. Everyone was apprehensive of an emergency and wished to be available at hand. We too continued sitting in front of the ICU. Late in the night when many would start spreading their towels and shawls on the cold floor of the veranda for a quick nap, we quietly returned to our room in the hospital. We would get into the beds for a brief slumber.

The medical problems of my mother had started when she was hit by a cerebral stroke that totally paralyzed the left side of her body. Her left arm and leg were rendered useless. After prolonged medical care and physiotherapy, some life and movement returned to her hand and leg. The therapies continued. Her condition started improving although the recovery was extremely slow and painful. After a while, she was able to get up and sit on her bed on her own. A few more weeks later she was standing. Before long, she relearned the art of walking. She was simply on cloud nine. 

But there was a problem. She would not stop walking. She probably wanted to make good the months of walking she had lost on her sick bed. She was cautious in the beginning. But by nature, she could not resist being fast in whatever she undertook. So, as days went by and her confidence rose, she pushed down the accelerator. Shortly she was running around the neighbourhood leaning on a walking stick. She was unmindful of the reality that her left side was still more dead than alive. Then the inevitable happened.  One day she slipped and fell down. 

We rushed her to a hospital in the city. The diagnosis was that the thighbone of her bad leg was badly broken. The surgeons suggested two options. One was surgery. The other was traction – the process of using weight to pull on the leg to enable the fracture to heal. Traction was a long-drawn-out procedure. So when the surgeon told us that there was a fair chance of mending the bone through surgical intervention, we agreed. In hindsight, we feel that surgery was a bad choice. The surgery turned out a tragic flop. Repeated attempts to fix the problems only worsened it. Thus, in less than a year after her partial recovery from the damages of the stroke, my mother was back in her bed. And she would remain there for the next twelve odd years.

But, my mother was too resolute a woman to fall into depression or abandon her fight to be on her own. The last thing she wanted was to stay tied to a sickbed for the rest of her life. Thus, her second season of struggles started. Before long, she acquired the skill of manoeuvring herself into a sitting position on her bed. Then she perfected the art of moving from the bed to the wheel chair, first with some help and then by herself. Considering that there was very little use of her paralyzed and broken left leg, the process was very elaborate and wearisome. But she simply would not mind or quit.  

During the entire period of her life on the sickbed, she had insisted on using her own hands to eat and drink. Struggling with just the right hand, she often spilled things around and over her. Yet she remained determined and never gave up her battle to be independent. To become a burden for others was the last thing she had wished. And it must be said to her credit that except for the final few months of her life, she was largely on her own. And I believe that without her never-say-die spirit and the can-do optimism she had no chance of surviving the tough and tragic circumstances of her life for so many years. Perhaps, she could do it because her life was tough not just after she was struck down by stroke but even during the years when she was young and healthy.

My mother had a tedious life as a woman bringing up her five children on the limited resources available to a middleclass agrarian family in a remote coastal village in Kerala. I remember our homestead of my childhood days as a tiny island in the middle of a vast circle of rice fields stretching out almost endlessly. During the pleasant part of the year, the breath taking beauty of the undulating green carpet of growing paddy embraced us. As the plants flowered and the paddy ripened, the dancing hue around us gradually changed from the deep green to a dazzling gold.

It all sounds idyllic. But there were hard realities hidden behind the external rural charm. When the monsoon came, everything changed. The rains poured down for months together bringing in the floods.  Rising waters entered our compound and often into our home. As the English Poet Samuel Coleridge writes, it was, “Water water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink”. At the height of the monsoons, country crafts were deployed to take us through the flooded rice fields to the ‘main land’*.

Monsoons were seasons of hunger for the village folks. All agrarian activities would come to a standstill with the onset of the monsoons. Farm labour would remain idle and hungry in their homes. The situation of the fisher folks was even worse. There were no motorized fishing boats those days. Fishers went out to sea on country crafts propelled by human rowers. Monsoon would bring mammoth waves and fierce winds. All fishing and associated activities would come to a grinding halt.  Soon hunger would stalk the shores. Epidemics may add to the miseries. Many would die. People would pawn or sell off their valuables to survive the monsoon famine.

The situation was not much better in the homes of the village farmers like ours. Although we never had to go hungry or sell off the valuables in our home, life was full of hard work, anxieties and agonies. The farmer was the perpetual victim of the viciousness and vagaries of nature. He would sow his fields unsure of what he would eventually reap. Many a times, there would be nothing to reap, thanks to the absence of rains, abundance of rains or unseasonal rains.

My parents were determined to save their children from the agonies of the difficult life they had owing to their total dependence on farm income. They wanted their children to receive better education and find occupations that would be less strenuous, and more assured and paying in comparison. My parents were not affluent or highly educated. But they believed in living with dignity. It was unthinkable for them to seek charity or borrow money. In the circumstances, in order to realize their dreams about their children, they had to find bona fide means of making some extra cash to supplement the unpredictable returns from cultivating the fields. 

Thus, milch cattle and domestic fowls entered our homestead. My mother was in control of those animals and birds. And her burdens mounted. I hardly ever saw her sitting idle. After she woke up before the break of dawn, she would be continuously busy. She was in the kitchen cooking for the large family and the farmhands helping us out in the fields. Or she was with the cattle, cleaning the shed, bathing the animals, milking or feeding them. Or she was with the chickens, tidying the coop, feeding the birds or picking up the eggs. Or she would be busy washing, sweeping, drying, planting, watering…. Finally, after family supper and prayers, she would crawl into her bed to be up and running at daybreak. She was a storehouse of energy and enthusiasm although overwork often made her ill. And her energy did not wane a bit almost until her last days. 

One of the critical lessons we children learnt the hard way from our mother was the dignity of labour. My mother drilled into us the Biblical verse, “By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food…” (Genesis 3:19). And she would not let us escape manual work even in our student days. Educating us was her greatest mission. Yet she wanted us to know that life was not easy.  Incidentally, a few years back when I was reading for my PG degree in ‘Gandhian Thoughts’, I came across the Gandhian idea of ‘Bread Labour’. Gandhiji had insisted on everyone contributing some manual work, which he termed ‘Bread Labour’. It was simply impossible that my mother had ever heard of the ‘bread labour’ philosophy of Gandhiji. But I now realize that it was this very same principle that she had practiced. All sustainable philosophies arise out of real life experiences.

But it was not in the case of ‘Bread Labour’ alone that my mother practiced some highly reputed ideas. Let me mention just one more such instance. My mother had always maintained a few dozen egg-laying hens in her coop. But she never sold the eggs daily. She had an arrangement with an ‘egg-man’ who would visit us at regular intervals. My mother would hand over the eggs, but would not take the price immediately. Instead, they kept some crude system of a running account. This way, my mother accumulated funds for some ‘major’ (by the standards and circumstances of those days) future expenses like paying our school fees, buying textbooks, or procuring another piece of furniture or utensil for our home.

Once the account collected the targeted sum, my mother would give notice to the egg-man. At the next visit, the egg-man would bring the sum thus far accumulated and would settle and close the account. A new one would start from that day. I never thought it a big deal until the modern finance gurus started telling people about the merits Systematic Investment Plan (SIP). SIP is simply the process of investing small sums at regular intervals to receive a big sum after a period. I now know what my mother was simply practicing SIP although she would have never comprehended the head or tail of SIP! 

But life has its share of disasters too. And it kept striking the family at regular intervals. For instance, a pregnant cow would suddenly keel over and die the day before it was to give birth. The chickens would be wiped out by a sudden spread of bird flu… The economic implications of such calamities were huge for the family. More than that, my mother loved her cattle and fowls like her own children. One of the most haunting images from my childhood days is that of my mother sitting on the ground beside a heap of dead White Leghorn chickens. Her head was bowed and tears ran down her cheeks…

But setbacks never put her off or dampened her spirits. Within a matter of weeks, a new cow and a new set of Leghorn chickens would roam our backyard. Her refusal to give up even when the odds were heavily stacked against her always remained an inspiration for her children. In the face of fatal setbacks, her focus remained riveted on the options before her to overcome the situation rather than to keep grieving and to live in depression. Because of such an attitude, many who came to meet her with sad faces often left with smiling faces. This was true even while she remained bedridden.

Today, young parents are often much concerned about the environment in which their children grow up. Experts on the subject tell us how important is for parents to be careful about the kind of formative influences to which their children are exposed in their young days. It is unlikely that educated parents would allow their children to be brought up in a rural setting as narrated above or by folks like my parents. But this is exactly how our children were brought up. 

After my marriage, we continued to live with our parents in the joint family. Then my brother married. My only child and his first child were born while we were living with our parents. All four of us were employed. We had our private doubts about leaving the children to the care of their grandparents. For one thing they knew little child psychology or scientific upbringing of children. For another we had serious reservations about the state of hygiene in the village homes some thirty years ago. Also, there were concerns of safety since we still lived surrounded by water. 

Rural Kerala

Nevertheless, our children were brought up by our parents. They grew up playing in the dirty mud and bathing under the public tap. Some five years later, we moved into our newly built homes in the town. To be honest, we had our apprehensions about the kind of influence that our parents had left in the life of our children. But now we realize that we had no reasons to worry and  that true love needs no university degrees. And such love has the power to influence young minds, perhaps, more positively than a scientifically regimented upbringing of children that the experts prescribe.

My mother was always ready to make personal sacrifices for others within and outside the family. She taught us to be truthful and be fully committed in whatever we did. She trusted the promise of the Bible that if we are faithful over a few things, we will be made rulers over big things (Mathew 25:23). We now realize it to be true.  She shared with the needy, a part of whatever little money she earned through her hard work and whatever food she cooked in her little kitchen. She remained a regular visitor of the sick and the senile in the neighbourhood.  Once she was bedridden, people regularly came to visit her. We always kept a small sum with her so that she could continue to extend little helps to those in need, who visited her… 

Let me now conclude. Although my mother was bedridden for long, the end came  almost suddenly. Some two weeks before she passed away, we noticed a sore underneath her bad leg. We rushed her to the hospital. The surgeon told us that her leg had to be amputated immediately to prevent the infection from spreading.  We had no options. Three days later, she underwent the surgery. She continued to recognize people and speak coherently even after her return after the surgery. But a day later, she suffered an epileptic seizure. When the seizures recurred, she was moved to the ICU.  The swing door of the ICU closed with a thud after the stretcher entered its deathly iciness. As it turned out, it was also the thud of the closing of the door on the life of my mother.

Late that Friday night we left our seats in front of the ICU and went to our room. We advised the ICU personnel to call us on the hospital phone in our room in case of any need.  At 1 A.M. on Saturday, September 26, 2015, the phone in the room rang. My brother hurled himself out of his bed and grabbed the phone. The next instant, he was hurtling down the stairs and racing towards the ICU. The door of the ICU swung open and a nurse with a weary look quickly took him inside…

My father died in November last year at the ripe old age of eighty-eight. Except for his final two years, he had remained healthy and active. My mother died at the age of eighty-three after being bedridden for twelve odd years. We believe that our parents were fortunate in many ways. They lived long enough to see and participate in the good life of their children and grandchildren.  We too have been fortunate. We learnt the importance of hard work, commitment and honesty from them. We also realized the value of love and sacrifice.

Perhaps, there is no rationale for us to grieve the death of our parents, given the circumstances. But we all cried bitterly when our father died. And we cried more bitterly when our mother died. We cried because we are humans. And humans are not just rational creatures.  They are also emotional creatures. And emotions often overpower reason. And that is not necessarily a bad thing in a world turning increasingly selfish and insensitive …

Finally, let the reader not misunderstand that the motive behind this post is to impress readers by painting my mother as an angel – a perfect wife, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother…  In fact she was not. Like any other human being struggling under the pains, pulls and pressures of a difficult worldly life, she too had her share of blemishes, weaknesses and shortcomings. The only objective behind this post is to remind the reader that in our humdrum existence in the present day world, we tend to forget the sufferings and sacrifices of our parents. If any reader would pause for a moment to remember the love of his or her parents, I shall feel rewarded…

Note:

*The landscape of my village has since changed completely. Rice farming became uneconomical particularly because of labour issues (The comrades considered the farmer a Capitalist). The former rice fields have all been filled and converted to homesteads. The village now has motorable roads reaching almost every home. And every household has at least one motor vehicle – a two-wheeler if not a four-wheeler. The floods and the country crafts have vanished from the scene. And Kerala now lives through its hot and dusty summers, often battling serious water crisis.  

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  1. Thank you. "Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating" wrote the famous English writer O.Henry, in his celebrated short story 'The Gift of Magi'. The story speaks about a young couple sacrificing what each considered their most valuable asset for making the other person happy. The objective of this post was to make the reader think over the importance of love, True love leads to sacrifices for the sake of others. I also wished to remind the reader that success comes from not giving up in the face of the set backs we are bound to encounter in our battles in realizing our dreams. Regards.

  2. Really emotional and heart wrenching to read about the daily struggles through which our mothers go and how we forget their sacrifices once we grow up.

  3. Great and wonderful are strong mothers
    Store every thing in mind like Virgin Mary
    Her soul is raised to paradise by her gifted son
    A reminder to young couples
    What love, life and Christianity is
    In this world of material value
    More than a hundred preachings and teachings
    What she sowed has risen with vigour

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