A MEMORY

How can a person survive a stroke and live with severe impairments for over twenty years?
How can a person engage little children in conversation without the faculty of speech? With mangled hands and a broken body… with sounds imperceptible…?
My childhood memories are filled with Chakravarty Dida’s presence. A friend of my grandmother, I have never seen her walk on her own or to even form legible words with her paralyzed lips.
The stroke that she suffered from left her speechless, incapable of using her fingers and thus, hands, and hardly able to walk on her own. Always on a walking stick, or frame and then finally on wheelchair, I’ve never seen a stronger lady than her.

The brave soul that resided in that broken body was infectious with her charm and energy and her exuberant nature that rubbed off on us pretty easily. Little kids 4 – 5 yrs old, our inhibitions towards her would melt away with the very first gesture of her face, inviting us to have a little chat. Many a times we needed help from her family members to translate the illegible sounds that she made… which were generally questions on our health and family. So on and so forth I grew up with her as a constant part of my life, no longer in need of a translator, I could strike up a conversation easily.. a bit emphatically and loudly but we managed it well.

How ironical life is, the able bodied people around you would never become a constant and yet this shriveled up woman, degrading right in front of your eyes would become a source of inspiration just for her resilience.

The woman who whooped every time I drove the car, even after a year of my very first day of driving, the woman who helped me to hide the peas that I stole from their kitchen, the woman who taught me the lesson on the need and how to maintain knowledge about neighbors, lies dead just two houses down.

I’ve never seen a body more broken, as if she finally gave in to death, her sole enemy for the past 20 years, and yet I ask was death her enemy? Did it not just give her respite from the pain that she went through every second of her life?
An answer I shall never find, and yet assuming for the best… I still cry like a baby lamenting for the loss of that constant in my life who had loved me and cared for me and had supported and inspired me without even talking to me. This silent bond can never be defined, and now I shall never be able to experience it anymore either.

I write this obituary for her in vain, knowing fully well that no one would read it, it provides no solace to anyone, it is not an obituary but a heart-shattering wail that rises from the bottom of my heart, unmatched by the storm outside, and these imperfect words are all that I could gather to make some sense out of this senseless grief.