Dear Lalit,
As is customary, this is the second of the two mails, I post for you annually, with the foolish yet fond hope that this will reach you. This is the one way perhaps, we can believe that you are with us…for some part, we live in disbelief, for that gives us some solace, too.
Sometimes, we live in a state of willing suspension of disbelief or even suspension of intelligence. Our family just got bigger; your sister is blessed with a baby boy. Many would want us to believe that you have come back to our fold. Yes, why not believe that.. for it is a pleasure to live in a state where we suspend realism & logic for the sake of enjoyment, into thinking that indeed you may have taken a birth once again to comfort our grief.. a perfect state of willing suspension of disbelief.
Recently, the whole nation was put to shame and sorrow in a brutal murder of a young school boy in Gurgaon. The innocent seven year lad was the hapless victim to the animal instinct of a reckless driver. In one swift motion, he snuffed out a precious life in an act of random madness.
A child to parents is a sort of an FD..a Future Deposit, where the future of the parents is deposited upon their child’s future, no matter the fickle assumptions. No words are adequate to comfort, when the parents are confronted by such a twist of fate to their 'FD'.
To All Parents, God seems to say –
"I'll lend you for a little time a child of mine," He said.
"For you to love for the while he lives and mourn for when he's gone.
It may be seven years or eighteen or twenty nine years...
Will you, till i call him back, take care of him for Me!??
He'll bring his charms to gladden you, and should his stay be brief,
You'll have his lovely memories as solace for your grief”.
Thank you God for small mercies !! For this boy's parents, the gift of a loan was for seven years.. whereas for us, it was twenty nine years of you with us. In the grand celestial scheme, He is not concerned that this little boy will not live to enjoy the full boyhood, the thrill of teenage, to be a young man setting many a hearts aflutter... but for us, He granted these mercies.. yet, He could not care less, that just when He opened your life to full bloom, that was the precise moment He had this change of plan and recalled you. He could not care less, that you had just celebrated the first birthday of your darling daughter... He could not care less, that you would never speak to anyone of your fairy-tale holiday in your future home.....He could not care less, that He would rob you of your future...He could not care less, that in the exciting future, you had planned a safe haven for your beautiful wife and dear daughter !!!
But He did take care to see that your family would live in a safe haven, though not the way you may have dreamed. Strange are the ways He toys with our hopes & dreams.
Today I read a post in FB from a friend that read… “the saddest moment is when the person who gave you the best memories becomes a memory”
Yes, indeed it is a sad truth that with time, all of us will fade into becoming a memory to a few. The memory will be treasured or discarded, depending upon the value we add when the brilliance of life shines upon us.
To us and to many of those you touched in your brief spell, the memories you left behind will be treasured for long.
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That 21st of September.
The day will surely dawn
Year after year
The sun will rise as it did in 2007
That 20th of September.
Giving hopes of a new dawn,
For our young son.
He sets out with a bye and a kiss to his dear wife
and daughter of one, he hugged with all his heart.
.
Uncle and Aunt bid him farewell
Until we meet again they prayed.
Embarking on a flight from Down Under
To the city of birth
Landing with the setting sun into the
20th
night,
For a short ride to the comfort of his home
Every sunset gives us one day less to live,
They say.
And they say,
Every day takes us nearer to our grave
Truer words were never spoken
For our young son.
The short ride in God’s will
Was the unwilling ride to His abode
So swift with fleeting hasty greed
Did He pluck our young son away.
Never to see another sunrise
And we shall never see our son rise again.
Shock and disbelief writ large on every face
That loved and adored this young man
The script was not meant to be thus…. But alas, it was
The mother of all tragedies, they all moaned.
...and mourned.
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Today, it is ten years of our life without your charms to gladden us.... yet, to an onlooker, we live as if everything is alright…we laugh, we travel, we joke, we work..
all the while, silently, only we know, your mother, sister and me..., we live with our hearts screaming in pain, hearts overwhelming with emptiness, grief and unspeakable love.
A million words would not bring you back.we know, because we tried. Neither a million tears, we know, because we cry, albeit silently within.
God has said, He shall call you back... but then what becomes of us...??
I read somewhere,
“A husband who loses a wife is called a widower
A wife who loses a husband is called a widow.
A child who loses his parents is called an orphan.
But there is no word, for parents who lose their child”.
and I might add...
There is no word for a child who loses a sibling.
The hardest part of losing a child is living everyday afterwards.
To the strength and resilience given to us to move on in life, we thank you, God.
To the courage to face the future, even when emptiness rules every fiber of our being, we thank you God.
To the vast opportunities & means to enjoy this Gift of Life, we thank you God.
To the Gift of Life that Lalit lived thru for 29 years, we thank you God.
Whoever said, cannot be more correct..
The strongest person in the world is a grieving mother, who wakes up and keeps going every morning.. !!!!
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Mohandas Kizhakke
