The Sadness in Her Eyes

| This was something I wrote for my Creative Writing assignment. |

“If you die, so will I” I said without a shadow of a doubt, in my innocent child voice. On hearing this, mother lovingly looked at me like she always did. But there was something in her eyes, a kind of sadness I had never seen before, sadness that I at five-and-half-years of age could not even begin to understand.

Mother and I shared a bond of great love. It is said, that the girl is always her daddy’s pet, however; I was always my mother’s. I never once in my life felt the need for a sibling for I had her. We played games, talked and had inside jokes. A third person watching the two of us could hardly ever understand what the mother-daughter pair was up to. We could communicate through our eyes.

With the passing years our bond only grew stronger. We became each others confidants and best friends. I know I was the apple of her eye, and for me there was never a person greater than her. 

On my 13^th birthday life decided to act cruel. My Ma was diagnosed with Cancer. After 2 years of surgeries and medicines and unbearable amount of pain she could not hold on any longer and, exactly a month before her 41st birthday my dear mother took her very last breath.

As I sat there on the floor right opposite my Mother's bed I could feel the presence of hordes of relatives around me, all crying and weeping, but I could not hear or see any of them. My eyes very fixated on the lifeless body of my beautiful mother and my ears searching only for the sound of her laughter.

I don’t even know how, but next, I found myself by my mother’s bed, head resting on her chest hands hugging her now lifeless body, wailing, wailing away in pain. A pain so strong it left me breathless. I could feel hands trying to pull me away but, I would not budge.

At that moment when I was being pulled away from her, a distant memory came rushing back to me, of time long ago when I held my mother and cried just as I was doing now.

 *** “Ma, get up Ma, I don’t want to play this game anymore.” Mother and I often used to play ‘dead or alive?’ It was a game where one of us pretended to be dead and lay down dead still on the bed with both eyes shut and the other would then go on to tickle the one playing dead, until the one playing dead would begin to laugh or move. This time it was her turn to play dead. “Ma, get up please.” It had been a few minutes now but she would not open her eyes even though I had been tickling her for quite some time. I was getting frantic by the second. “MA!! Stop it!!” I said while shaking her face to the best of my might. “Mamma?” I could take it no more, I started to cry. “Ma, please...please mamma..” and finally she opened her eyes and instantly drew me into a tight hug. I instantly felt at peace. I loved her hugs, they always made me feel that warm. I believe in her arms the world was but fickle and could harm me in no way. I looked at her pretty face and smiled. How I loved her.

Mother, still holding me her arms, cocked her head to the left and locked her dark brown eyes with mine and asked “Jaana, tell me one thing, what will you do if I really were to die?” “If you die, so will I.”***

As I looked now at the soul departed body of my mother I knew for a fact that this time she wasn’t playing dead. This time around no matter how much I cry, Ma would not wake up and pull me into one of her hugs that I loved so much. I knew for a fact, that she did indeed die, but I did not. I was alive. Alive but, now lost without her presence. That is when the meaning of the look that I had witnessed in her eyes when I was 5 and half years old suddenly dawned to me. It all made sense now.

Ma knew that as much as I loved her, there would one day come a time that I would have to live without her. I would not just drop dead the moment she closed her eyes forever. My life would have to go on even without her by my side. She knew the intensity of the grief that I would feel in her absence, she probably felt the pain all those years ago, the very same numbing pain that I feel everyday and perhaps, that was the sadness I had seen in her eyes. A kind of sadness that I now understand.

“Jaana, tell me one thing, what will you do if I really were to die?” “If you die, I will die.”