A Commemoration of Mothers by Nerin Naidu
(Author of Birth, Death and Moments Between)
www.nerinnaidu.com
I woke up on a Monday morning under a month ago to over twenty missed calls and text messages from my sisters tell me to call either one of them urgently. We all live in different continents.
“Someone must have died!” I thought to myself, sweating and shivering in fear.
“Mummy’s been taken to hospital. She’s having difficulty breathing,” said my sister.
“We know nothing else. We are trying to get flights out.”
After a few painful hours of waiting with abated breath, I heard my mother’s voice.
A soothing calm enveloped me.
I spoke to her when she was first admitted before any of the tests were done to confirm or refute the suspected disease.
Softly, almost inaudibly she said, “I’m in hospital. They just drained a litre of fluid from my lungs. They think its cancer.”
Silence…
We both listened to each other’s breathing. Hers, laboured and deliberate, mine gasping, panicking.
“It may be cancer,” she said again matter-of-factly.
She added after a long pause, “ They also found a mass in the left breast and the collapsed lung.”
“No way, Mummy!” I replied. “It could not possibly be cancer. We have never had a history of cancer in our family,” I reassured her.
“Let’s just wait and see,” she said after considering my words.
I confidently told her, that she had a long way to go before death visited. I was so completely and utterly wrong because death paid my Mother an unexpected visited two short weeks later.
“I’m taking the next flight out,” I added.
“No,” she said. “Let’s wait for the tests.”
I applied for my Canadian visa the moment she ended the call and waited for her to tell me to go to her. She never did.
The dreaded vias took a full 72 hours after numerous calls to the consulate explaining the urgency.
“I just got the visa Mummy,” I said to her.
“Don’t come yet” she said.
“Wait until after the Easter rush. I will need your help when the others have left,” she assured me.
A few days before I was due to leave, my mother called to say Good Bye.
“I can’t wait for you. I see you on Facetime all the time. I’m dying tomorrow morning,” she said.
My mother was a very practical, stoic woman. She was ready to die. I was not ready for her to die. Are we ever really ready for our parent’s death?
“Please mummy wait for me!” I begged.
“No, I’m ready now. I just want to say Good Bye…”
I lost my mother to cancer less than a month ago. She was diagnosed two weeks prior to her death with stage 4 breast cancer which had metastasised to her lungs.
She was one of the lucky ones though. She did not suffer but dictated the time and place of her demise. She passed away peacefully, a smile on her lips, with loved ones at her side and those of us that could not be with her in person held on to her for as long as we could, watching the passing online, offering our final prayers from afar.
Perhaps the most and least gratifying role is that of motherhood.
Mothers are seldom seen by innocent minds as simply fallible human beings with dreams, thoughts and goals of our own. We are often taken for granted, seen as super-women, unbreakable and the figure that will always be there even as we pass the years from the birth of our precious off-springs, to their adulthood themselves, while growing older, maybe wiser and often frailer ourselves.
As Mothers, we go about our daily lives wearing a number of hats so that we can be everyone we need to be for our children. We are the carers, cooks, cleaners, teachers, nurses, counsellors, chauffers, earners and sometimes punching bags for our children, because we are mothers and it is both instinctive and expected of us.
Mothers constantly and lovingly give, asking for little in return, we nurture even when we ourselves require nurturing. We become almost invincible in the eyes of our innocent children, until they start, sometimes lovingly, sometimes not-so-much, questioning our worth, our values, our very role in their lives.
I see from the eyes of mother and daughter. I am both blessed with and guilty of being both.
I never expected the day to come where I would be unable to chat to my mother, tell her of all the goings on in my all too busy life, complain about trivialities that mean nothing, hearing her soothing words of calm reassurance, constantly asking her for ago old recipes and home remedies from her mother passed on from her grandmother.
My mother listened, advised, smiled, laughed, cried, scolded and loved me unconditionally. And I, the child, took every moment for granted. Reassuring her that I would see her in September. September would never come though, at least not for my mother.
Her passing although devastating, has gifted me with the in-depth insight of a mother, a person nobody can replace. Only when one is gone can we see the complete picture of who they really were, the good, the not so good and all the in-betweens that make us human, for we are fallible beings born to learn life-long lessons.
I look within as a mother myself and try to remember all the incidental lessons, advise, stories and memories passed down from my mother and her mother before her.
I smile when my daughter shares her many blissful moments, success and joy with me. I cry when I know her heart is sore. I listen offering advice only if she askes for it. I scold her then regret my harshness. I hold her close at every chance I get, telling her how much I love her and at the end of it all I close my eyes and see my mother in me as I hope that one day when my daughter looks at her own off-spring, she will see a bit of us all- her mother, grandmother and great grandmother shining through her.
Take the time to see your mother, the real her, love her as she is and let her know how grateful you are for her. Share the moments together while you can because the twilight years come all too soon, and we are forced to say our final Good Byes.
