Shivoham

As I wrote earlier, Ma and I attended Vedanta lectures together at various places. I was especially attracted to Sankaracharya’s work and would try (failingly) to read. There were a few of his poems that Ma and I loved. One was Bhajagovindam which she used to listen to a lot. Another was Atmashatakam, which we both loved. I have always sung it to Arhan who thinks it’s a lullaby. Ma asked me to sing it to her while we were in the hospital one evening. This is when she was deteriorating after about 5 weeks of the urokinase treatment for her pleural effusion and lung infection. She was particularly uncomfortable one evening after a dose of the urokinase. She asked me to sing this to her. I don’t think I had finished when she asked me to call the nurse because she was very uncomfortable. Shortly after that I left to go back to th US and we had started thinking about surgery to resolve the lung infection. I’m glad we didn’t because we probably would have achieved nothing. She wasn’t destined to get better and all our counting of metrics - fluid in the lungs, urine, creatinine and in her final days counting down her BP and heart rate, waiting for the terrible eventually - would count to naught. 

The night she passed away - I came to the hospital at 11 pm. Her heart rate was fluctuating from zero to 25 and BP was not reading. The nurses kept taking notes like they always did while people died, gasped to live all around them and hearts kept breaking. I was amazed at their note taking in all stoic ness. She looked up and said another 30 minutes. I called Didi and Baba and told them to come. And while I waited for them, I kissed Ma’s cold cheeks many times, touched her smooth, flawless skin again and again. And I bent down to her ears and sang to her for the last time, Adi Shankaracharya’s Atmashatakam. This lullaby, that I sing to my son at bedtime, I sang to my mother to put her to bed for eternity.