In April, the axis on which I built my world shifted forever. I lost my Mammu. The pain hits in waves that ebb and crash through my being.
There are still a thousand things I want to tell her. So now I speak to her everywhere instead – in my mind, to her favourite chair in the corner of the kitchen, the Gods in her temple, the flowers she planted, the unfinished crochet, the jars of pickle lining the shelves, the unread pages of the book lying on her bedside table, her toothbrush, the clothes she last wore, her shoes… Grief has a way of turning the ordinary into the sacred.
People say loss changes you. What they do not tell you is that it rearranges the meaning of home. Because sometimes home was never a place. It was a person.
When I felt the cold seep into her body, I wanted to hold her close and give her my heat. I wanted to put the beat back into her heart, to breathe life back into her soul. In that moment, love met helplessness, and it lost. I lost.
There is also a quiet terror that accompanies grief, the fear of forgetting. Forgetting the exact texture of her voice. The warmth of her hands. Her laughter. I cling desperately to details because memory suddenly feels fragile, as though love itself might fade if not rehearsed daily.
Grief also teaches us something else about love: we do not lose people entirely; they continue through instinct. Through phrases we catch ourselves repeating. Through recipes made by memory instead of measurement.
Through courage inherited unknowingly.
The relationship between a mother and daughter is perhaps one of life’s deepest inheritances. It is layered with tenderness, conflict, imitation, rebellion, dependence and eventually, startling resemblance. A daughter spends years becoming herself, only to discover traces of her mother stitched into the way she nurtures, speaks, comforts and survives.
Loss transforms that relationship, but it does not end it. A mother and daughter never really stop speaking. Even after death, the conversation continues… through memory, ritual, longing and love.
My mother taught us how to live fully and fearlessly. She just forgot to teach us how to live without her.
I am forever, forever grateful to this universe that you are Our Mammu, the centre of who we are. You are and aways will be our true home. I know I am questioning the timing of a universe that has never missed a single sunrise, yet, just for a moment more…
