This Is It
Losing grandparents is hard. The heartbreak you experience of losing a favorite grandparent transcends all sorts of pain. It is even more hurtful if you have loved them as profoundly as they loved you although I doubt any grandkid can beat the love of their grandparents. When I lost my paternal grandmother in the early 2000s, I felt a pang of regret that I did not get to know her enough. She was a warm, compassionate person who talked less but expressed through her actions of affirmative love: being prepared with the best dishes the Delhi-based grandchildren liked, sending the most sumptuous 'pothichoru' (piping hot meal wrapped in lightly toasted banana leaf) for our train journey back home, and spending hours peeling off jackfruit and banana to make snacks for us to share with our friends (and brag). She had a fuzzy way of saying goodbye to us. As we loaded our luggage into the car, she would call my brother and me, and give the 'sniff-kiss'. For the uninitiated, sniff kiss was her kissing us on our hands and occasionally, on the cheeks and sniffing while doing so. It was as if she was trying to soak in our scent to lend her strength till we visited again the following year. I never really cried when I saw her resting peacefully in our house courtyard, surrounded by people offering condolences to the grieving family. It only took the sight of her being lit up in the funeral pyre that I realized: 'this is it'; she is not coming back. And the dams broke. I will never see her again in that home, sitting on the porch flanked by the sky blue walls sipping tea and reading the daily newspaper, her vision 20/20 till the day she passed away; I will never share the same room with her, hearing her stomach-quivering low laugh when the cousins would crack a joke; I will never feel her sniffing my hands that left a lingering smell of her on the back of my hand. It was too late before it hit me that I did not make enough memories with her.
My paternal grandmother
My ammumma
All this while, I was attached to my maternal grandparents. My ammumma (maternal grandmother) raised me and being the oldest (and the only female child) in the house, I was a very spoiled child. Coming to meet them after a stay at my dad's house was a huge dynamic shift because I was the queen here unlike there where I had to fight for my voice to be heard in the cousin hierarchy. Ask and ye shall receive was the order of the house here. Ammumma and I would spend HOURS talking, giggling, and gossiping about the most banal things, and it never felt like a chore to spend all that time. I loved trapping her in the vicious cycle of 'run your hands through my hair to check for knots' and that was it: heaven. She would tell me about who married whom, the news article that shocked her, her next to nil love declarations, antics of her siblings, and frustrations of having a discipline-bound husband, and it would continue. She would share all this while also giving me tips on having voluminous hair, luscious skin, and occasionally desperate pleas to not cut my long hair. I consider myself to be extremely fortunate to have accompanied her on her much much-desired visits to the places she wanted to go to fulfill her late mother's wishes.
On the afternoon of 17th May, I lost my ammumma. Although she struggled in her final days being bedridden, she passed away peacefully. I was with my friends when I received the news. Have you ever felt a soul-crushing pain that comes when you experience something incredibly tragic? I felt that sense of pain. Seeing her limp, lifeless body that I once saw with effervescence broke my spirit. As I put the last few grains of rice in her mouth as a part of the final rites, the memories of her running behind me with her childlike feet, to feed me, rushed into my mind. She absolutely hated that I ate sparingly when I was engrossed in work. Seeing a few grains of rice stuck on my palm, I thought to myself: 'This is it'. A fully grown adult who raised me into this version of me is reduced to this.
You feel the void when people you love pass away, regardless of your relationship. You see them in the things or situations you once shared with them. The 'Ah! I wish she was here to see this!' consumes you. Letting my ammumma go was necessary but heartbreaking. She would often joke 'I don't think I will be alive to see you...' and add something morally offensive as per my standards and to which I would scoff and walk off. She did, however, see me tick all the significant milestones of my life. And I would like to believe that despite her slipping memory, she took all those critical moments in, locking them safely in the confines of her mind.
Watching her funeral pyre, I bid goodbye to her for the last time: walking back to a house where I will never see her waiting for me. I will never feel her fingers caress my hair. I will never see her on the edge of my bed at 4am, constantly reminding me every half hour that it is time to wake up for my 9am bus. I will never see the shock on her face when I would experiment with her hairstyles: the last being a pixie cut because I thought it was cute (and because she was too frail to fight me). I will never hear her say words of affirmation and affection that she loved throwing around like confetti to family and random strangers. She was undisputed in the domain of 'unconditional love' and the woman gave generously and expected nothing in return. I often told her that she was the reason I trusted people implicitly and grew up to be extrovert max, which is not always good. And yet, she would make it a point to go and talk to every person at a wedding or a funeral or a roadside stall.
I decided that I will not mourn her loss. I definitely feel grief, but I will not wallow in misery because she loved living her finite life. She loved, she lost, she slipped, but she never erred in her ways of showing compassion and empathy. And that is something I will continue to cherish and aspire to secure for myself too. Even though this goodbye was exceptionally hard, I am glad that I experienced her love and that she chose me to share her love. Here's to you Ammumma, you bloody amazing human. You have no idea how much we are going to miss you.
