Memories

Day 507

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For the past few months, our house has undergone some major and minor alterations. We moved out for a couple of months and then back again, living out of a suitcase most of the time. Sometimes it has felt like being unwanted guests living in a spare room in our own house, getting in the way of the builders while they want to get on with the work.

Last week they finally left. We got our home back, filled with stacks of boxes, a persistent layer of dust on every available surface and the unmistakable stink of paint. We set today’s date for having a few friends over for a home-cooked Indian meal and having a priest perform a small prayer service to bless the house as is customary.

Saagar’s closest friends came over. One of them, a medical student proudly showed me the picture of his first publication. Another, a budding golfer shared his excitement over his upcoming summer job at one of the best golf courses in California. Another, an amateur actress spoke at length about the series of theatre workshops she conducted last summer as part of the Rickshaw Theatre Project for kids in India and how amazing that was, having known Saagar and his pride in his heritage.

Its silly to say I missed Saagar. Of course I did but I feel him in my heart all the time. I see him in all his friends, in their proud achievements and simple joys. When all of us who love him dearly are together, he can’t be too far away. In his own words, he is a bit of a (cha)party animal after all. Love you darling. xxx

Day 505

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Motherhood

Sadler’s Wells and Old Vic are two iconic theatres in London. The former is famous for its dance performances and the latter for theatrical ones. This week we happened to visit both of them. The last time I visited these two venues, Saagar was with me.

I looked at the seats we had and remembered what we watched, the restaurants where we had dinner, the food we ordered, others who went with us, his light flirtations with the waitress, some of the jokes we shared, him excusing himself to go out for a smoke… everything.

Is there ever an end to heartbreak? How many times is it possible for one poor heart to shatter? How sustainable is the process? What is this ‘motherhood’ thing? Why is it so strong and painful?  The scientific analogy that best summarizes it for me is maternal-fetal microchimerism– a phenomenon of fetal cells crossing the placenta and establishing lineages within the mother. These fetal cells have been documented to persist and multiply in the mother for several decades. So Saagar and I are likely to have some of each other’s intact cells inside us forever — as I have with my mother, and she with hers, and so on.

Elizabeth Stone says “having a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” To me, that includes half my DNA, some of my cells, and so many of my hopes and dreams, all in one sweet, kissable, adorable package. The one I lost.

Day 501

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Ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging in practice for the last 600 years. It developed from the Buddhist ritual of offering flowers to the spirits of the dead. By the middle of the fifteenth century, with the emergence of the first classical styles, ikebana achieved the status of an art form independent of its religious origins, though it continued to retain strong symbolic and philosophical overtones.

In 2012 Saagar left home for university, about 5 hours away. I missed him so much that I avoided coming home in the evenings. After attending an Ikebana exhibition and a few demonstrations, I was enamoured by the beauty and creativity in those arrangements. I started taking lessons in Ikebana once a week. The classes were held in the evening. They brought me close to the smells and textures of various kinds of fresh flowers and foliage. I learnt some lovely musical names like Lisianthus and Zantedeschia. I also learnt to match them with their faces. I could now appreciate the depth of the redness of dogwood and the palpable tenderness of rose buds. It was a whole new world of shapes, materials, colours, techniques, spaces and movements. It was meditative in its own serene way. A couple of hours went by in the blink of an eye.

After a gap of nearly 18 months, I restarted the lessons last week. It is heart warming to be reunited with old friends.

 

 

 

Day 492

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She is 40. Fit, healthy and smiling anxiously. She is in the hospital because she needs help with being able to be a mother. The doctors have given her some medicines to increase the number of mature eggs in her ovaries to help her with in-vitro fertilisation. She is on the operating table. Her husband waits outside. She is deeply sedated for harvesting of the eggs. The surgeon can see 2 follicles and he drains them both. He makes doubly sure that he has done everything he can to get the eggs out of those follicles for her.

My assistant sits in the corner, praying with her eyes closed and all of us have our fingers crossed. The embryologist from nextdoor comes back – ‘No eggs.’ There is a stunned silence in the room. Unbelievable! Everyone stops. The energy in the room drops to the floor.

We keep her asleep for a bit longer and take a few moments to mourn the loss of hope. The loss of a possibility, a future. The loss of what could have been. The loss of something that didn’t actually exist in that moment.

While feeling this way, I was utterly grateful for having experienced motherhood with all its joys and trials.

‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.’ – Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Day 488

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Every night I wish to see him in my dreams.
That’s the closest I can get.
On a few occasions I did.
Once as an utterly cute 5 year old, reminding me how it broke my heart to be separated from him when leaving for work.
Once as a 20 year old, at home with his friends sharing laughs and youtube videos as if he was actually here. I woke up feeling delighted and deeply sorrowful at the same time. Yes. It is possible.

Working regularly with women giving birth has a subliminal effect on the women who work with them. Two nights ago I dreamt that I was undergoing a Caesarean section. A beautiful and healthy baby was born, I was told but I was not allowed to see him or her. They told me that because I was a surrogate mother, I could not see the baby lest I develop an attachment to him or her. So, even though the baby was mine, it was not. It was someone else’s to the extent that I was not to see him. Maybe the root cause of all this pain is ‘I’ and ‘mine’.

That was a nightmare. I couldn’t fall back to sleep thereafter. I lay in the dark with my eyes open. I am just living my life and doing my best to keep things as ‘normal’ as possible but nightmares come uninvited.

Let’s blame it on the cauliflower cheese we had for dinner the night before.