Letting Her Go
Few weeks ago I was in the emergency room in the local hospital for a minor ailment. While waiting to be hauled for a CT scan, I overheard a nearby patient give his year of birth to the nurse. It was 1935, the same year my mother was born. For a few moments I was glad and then sad; glad, because someone purportedly of my mother's age is still living, sad because my mother is not. Of course, it is a known fact that the average life expectancy in India is about a decade lower than that in the US (69.7 versus 78.9 years, to be exact ). My mother died on Feb 26, 2013, in the ICU of a hospital in our hometown in India, two-and-half hours after I reached her bedside. About fifty hours earlier, she called me as she was getting ready to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. All she could say was that she was having shortness of breath and waiting to be rushed to the hospital. I did not realize at that time that it was meant to be our last conversation. In the summer of 2010, Atul G