Au revoir for now, my greatest hero

Today is July 8th, 2019 – exactly a month since the Cathay Pacific flight from Chennai, India landed safely into San Francisco International Airport. It felt great to be back home. The crisp cold air of San Francisco whipped life back into me after that 24-hour long journey westward. Actually, a much longer and arduous emotional journey it was, hiding an element of shock I would have hardly imagined when I headed to Chennai a couple of weeks earlier.

Wednesday June 20, 2019 – My wife and I boarded a Cathay Pacific flight from San Francisco and landed in Chennai. We planned a quiet two week vacation to spend time with our aging parents. When we boarded the plane, we received a message that my mother was admitted to hospital for an innocuous pain management treatment. She was going to be back home on Monday.

Saturday, June 22, 2019 – We landed in Chennai. Later that evening, we visited mother at the hospital. She was enduring pain but the doctors said that it would subside.

Sunday, June 23, 2019 – I visited my mother at the hospital. The pain had subsided. She looked fresh, was alert and was in fact beautiful at 88. Just the two of us, we talked about different things for about five hours. Mother talked at length about her deep love and respect for my father and her husband cherishing small incidents when he showed his love for her. I read out my recent blog “My Greatest hero” to her in which I express how my relationship with her and my love for her evolved over time. She remembered all the details and reciprocated my sentiments.

The next thirty two hours saw the rapid decline of mother’s health. Complications set in one after another. She was unconscious through most of it. While I was witness to a struggling body that finally succumbed to death, I knew deep inside that her soul was at peace. My mother and my greatest hero attained the feet of Almighty on June 25, 2019.

Heroes always have a plan, even in their last act. So did my mother – my greatest hero – it seems. Reflecting back on how this final tête-à-tête came about, unbeknownst to me, I now realize that it was nothing short of a cosmic arrangement of love, events, people and intuition revealing a much bigger picture to me.

My trip to Chennai with my wife was a last minute plan, almost an intuition. We don’t fancy the wrath of Chennai’s heat in June and so have never undertaken a jaunt east during summer. But this time, we did. Both my wife’s and my work schedules changed so we could fly out earlier. A strong urge to finish my post “My greatest hero” surfaced in mid-May and I finished it after a 4-year struggle not knowing how to finish it. Our son offered to take care of our dog for two weeks. So many things miraculously fell in place. My mother’s plan was working without me realizing it!

I also learned later that mother had expressed a desire to have me by her side to her sister and a friend. She knew that I’d be there to see her. She was indeed working her plan!

It seems like mother had summoned the Universe to play out a grand cosmic arrangement in support of her plan. I’m humbled and am in awe of the invisible hand that orchestrated that journey that I undertook in June. The winds of destiny brought mother and me together from thousands of miles apart to her final moments. Truly heroic!

I am immensely thankful to my friends and family for their kind words of support. A theme was constant in all of their messages: that I was blessed to be next to my mother. A friend summed it up as “that’s a gift from mother to you and to herself”.

Rumi said “Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation”.

Au revoir for now, my greatest hero! See you again in a sequel.