We'll always have that
Footprints of love
A BIG thank you!
Firstly, I want to thank you all for all the messages, calls, comments and emails with your kind thoughts for me on the loss of my mother. I appreciate it very much. Grief makes its own journey. And it does no one any good to bury it or hurry it so I let it come when it does. But the love and sympathy of friends and loved ones definitely provides succor for its course. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart!
A little pondering…
I also wanted to share this little pondering I wrote earlier this year when I was reflecting on my father’s passing from over a year ago. Those days I was calling my mother frequently, both of us grieving for what was lost while trying to celebrate what we had with him - and will always have.
Because as Theodor Geisel - better known as Dr. Seuss - said, “Don’t Cry Because It’s Over; Smile Because It Happened.”
Blankets for short days
by Reena Kapoor
I look at our “new” dog D who’s five but he’s never met some of my important people. He loves blankets just as much as everyone else in this house does. Even now he burrows into one and hides. We need blankets when we collude, grieve, work, or simply lounge on the sofa reading or watching TV, and even when we contemplate how little time there is. Cold days are also short days. When he first arrived D didn’t waste time. He promptly imbibed all our habits. The fact that D has never met some of my family - my India family - seems impossible. When I last talked to my mother on the phone she remembered the most recent time she and my Dad visited. Her statement that it all feels like a dream made me want to abandon the fight altogether. She is right that what happened over six years ago seems vaporous. I look for all the connecting dots in the intervening years. My father’s diagnosis, his decline, my frequent visits to see him, all the while pretending it was always going to be like that, the arrival of Covid, our old dog M’s tumor, and my final trip back to see my father when my sister called to say, “you should come”. I went. No questions, no vaccine, no plan. When I came back the color of everything had changed. Now D will never meet him. Has it only been a year?
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If we love then we put ourselves at risk of loss. Always. And yet when we love, we also create something we will always have. Perhaps an unforgettable memory, perhaps something we learn about ourselves, perhaps simply proof that we’re capable of love and that we found it in this short and miraculous existence…
And what an incredible gift that realization alone is!
A clarification…
In a previous post, the poem Chitra elicited many thoughtful comments and responses. I love hearing from you all so please keep them coming.
One perspicacious reader pointed out that a line that was confusing. Towards the end I say, “I had so many questions and so much fury for this woman…” That line made it sound like my fury was directed at Chitra. I can see how that line can be read that way. So I wanted to clarify what I meant i.e., I had fury on her behalf, as in for her cause, NOT at her. A big thanks to the reader! I greatly treasure the time and thoughtfulness such feedback takes.