The cremation

Ma passed away just as the clock had passed midnight on November 3. It was still November 2 in other parts of the world. She had started dying on October 31. In the Christian part of the world this time is celebrated as All Saints Day. The Mexicans celebrate their dead in a festival called  Dia des Muertas, during - you guessed it, Oct 31-Nov 3. While walking back one night from the hospitals I saw the local church’s gravestones being decorated with flowers and candles. My mother didn’t just pass away on some random day. She and her pure heart went during an auspicious and holy time, when scores prayed for their dead, she joined their ranks. 

But during the first few minutes of November 3, 2017, her BP slowly gave way to unreadable and heart rate down to zero. I wasn’t there for the final pronouncement of death. I waited outside with Baba. That was the night the hospital administration decided to clean the ICU lobby. The loud sound of the vacuum drowned out our voices and stifled tears. By then we were numb and crying. It’s a strange feeling. We made calls to relatives informing them of final demise even though everyone knew it was imminent. 

There arose a flurry of debates on what next steps. Should we cremate her right away or do we wait till morning? The hospital resolved this by offering to keep her in the mortuary until 9 am. 

Didi had brought her new sari. The nurses unclasped her from the various IV and central lines. Her body had bloated up as the fluid retention inside made her look like a drowned corpse. I was ashamed at my own repugnance. I went in to see her and while everyone around me wailed, I recoiled silently in horror never wanting to see my mother like that. But I had no choice and I was certainly not going to have respite. 

They brought her body home to Dinkar at 9.30 am. Several people had shown up, waiting. I took a long time to get ready. Somehow prolonging the time it took to brush my hair and paint my eyes felt like i was postponing something I didn’t want to do. We had all barely slept all night and I had several calls from people in the US. I monotoned my way through those calls, explaining the same events. I recall very vividly how desolate it all felt. It seemed like a bad dream but I couldn’t even sleep to awaken from it. But wearing my eyeliner that morning I overdid it partly from wanting to hide the puffiness and partly from avoiding coming out of the room. So suddenly there I was, all decked up to go to my mothers cremation. 

The body was there. They laid it down and we were asked to sit by her as various people came to pay respects. There is a reason I call it a body because that was not my mother. My mother was a small, beautiful, chiseled-cheek woman even into her ailing old age.  I remember feeling like I wanted to escape. Suddenly in that flurry, Baba couldn’t be found. I walked outside to go find him and saw him walking back with a bouquet of flowers. He always gave her flowers for birthdays and anniversaries and he said, he couldn’t forget this time. 

Then there was the ride to the crematorium. Didi and I rode with the body in a rickety ambulance.  Someone asked me to throw coins and grain out of the window for the birds. There must have been some archaic significance to it. Every ounce in my body resisted everything that was going on. I felt helpless and out of control. People would tell me what to do and I’d do it like a robot, hating our archaic customs that remove the true feeling of grief from that moment, but still expect a certain performance of caricatured sadness. 

At the crematorium we had a ceremony. It was a large cool hall with chairs. People gathered around. They laid her body down on a stone bench resembling ironically a sarcophagus. We mumbled some stuff after the priest as my sister and I performed rituals. We lathered her bare skin with butter. We dropped water droplets on her lips. It made me remember three nights ago, the ghastly Monday night, when she was on the oxygen mask and desperately asking for water and we gave her a few sips. They laid her on the so called pyre and she was rolled into the furnace.  We waited there for the next two hours to collect the ashes. Didi walked with them to the sea and she emptied the pot of ashes into the ocean, cleaving heavy with human waste and remnants of prior cremations. I reminded myself that none of this was her. She was already blending into the cosmos with or without her ashes. 

But that’s what I tell myself. I really ask, where did she go? How was she there one day, talking to me; another day lying unconscious and a third day into ashes? I ask myself this all the time? She was there and then she isn’t. And now she’s only in my head and every thought I think. She went from being my living mother to a concept, a thought, a raw sense of longing and loss inside of me. It feels like the ground underneath my feet had given way and I was on murky soft sand. 

What has shocked me the most is how that has changed everything I held dear to my heart. My job, my life with my family all of which are nothing but incredible blessings and great source of pride to her feel pale in comparison to the last few days in the hospital with her. While we felt impatience for her to get better and then cold dread and then impatience again for it all to end painlessly for her, as awful as those days were, I would give anything to be back there with her. I would trade that Groundhog Day memory with my current Groundhog Day present of waking up in the morning amidst my thousand blessings, cognizant of my mother being dead. My daily toils with brief snippets of joy pale in comparison to the time she was with me. I feel angry at times with her for taking with her my joy. The end of all we endeavor is going to be just ashes in the wind and sea anyway.