After just over a month, we have all circled back to our home in Chicago. And here I sit after a long bit of silence with not much, yet so much on my mind. Nalin had gone back to India the third week of April to be with his mother in her last weeks. We, in turn (the boys and I), traveled down to Missouri to be with my parents. Throughout that time, I thought often of our little routines at home: the way we play, eat, cook, read, sleep, etc., and how our interactions with one another so greatly influence our health and well-being. When someone is missing from that equation, everything seems to stand still. And yet the time with my family was beautiful. My sons reveled in the attention of their lovely cousins and aunties, and the continuous care from my parents, right down to my dad making grocery runs to the local "whole foods" grocery store for me, couldn't have been more appreciated. After all, home is where you make it and what you make of it. And home is where you are loved and where you love.
So here we are back again, although now so much has changed. Nalin's mom passed away in her home, with two of her sons by her side, nearly two weeks ago now. Yesterday, as I was preparing a meal for my family, back in the kitchen I know so well, I couldn't help but think of the literally thousands of meals she prepared for her family in her all-too-short life. I imagined her juggling the vegetables and bowls and pots from counter to stove and back with five children at her feet and in her line of sight. I conjured the smells of her kitchen and the delighted look on her husband's face as he tasted her lamb pilaf. She nurtured and nourished six amazing people (and of course many more now with spouses, grandchildren, extended family), with one of whom I am so lucky to spend my life.
A little over a week ago, Nalin and I spent time over the phone and through email composing a eulogy for him to read at his mother's memorial service in Kurukshetra. I had recently come across this quote from Susan Sontag that we decided to borrow:
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
Nalin's mom had been a citizen of "that other place" for nearly a year. The only comfort was that she was able, for the most part, to be at home surrounded by those she loved and the familiar sights, sounds, and smells that became her sustenance throughout her final months, weeks, and days. As Nalin traveled back to India in late April, he read Meghan O'Rourke's piece in the New Yorker entitled "Story's End," with the subtitle: "Writing a mother's death." It is a stunning piece, made more powerful to me by the knowledge of Nalin sitting on a plane by himself reading it alone as he made the journey home that no child is prepared to make.
As I sat there a week ago, writing a mother's death in the far corner of a Starbucks in Springfield, Missouri, home never seemed more real or more poignant that in the moment he and I read the eulogy together aloud over the phone later that night, with thousands of miles between us. I must say, though, it feels much better to have him here now by my side.