Amma: Celebrating an invincible spirit

 The past three years have been the most difficult years of my life. I've been navigating a demanding PhD program with an entire universe of ups and downs, watching my dad go through a stroke, sink into being paralyzed and bedridden, and then inhabit the universe of chronic pain and illness. Last year, my grandfather joined him in the chronically ill world, and I look back and see a blur of health scares, hospital admissions and grief. My parental home resembled a hospital, with sick people (two) outnumbering the healthy (one), and my Mom as the primary caregiver to both her husband and her father. We lost my grandfather a few months ago, and now my father seems to be teetering on the edge of sanity. I won't even get into all the other things that have been going on in the family. This alone is enough to shake and uproot a person and drive them insane. If I am here today, still continuing my PhD and holding on to my sanity and health, I have primarily one person to thank. My amazing and resilient mother. I'll be honest here, we don't get along well all the time. In fact, most of the time, we don't see eye to eye. Despite that, I admire and recognize her as the strongest person I know. I am writing this post on her 68th birthday, to celebrate all that she stands for, and to give thanks to the Universe for blessing me with such a wonderful parent.

Where do I start? Amma, I am in awe of how driven and passionate you are about your work. I know they say that doctors are like that, but everyone has a choice. How have you worked 7 days a week for 43 years now and still have more to give the world? Not once have I heard you complain of burnout or boredom, and I simply cannot comprehend how you do this. How do you listen to people and their problems, day after day, and still react with compassion and patience? The other day, my eyes filled up when you told me about how people offer to help you when they see you on the road. I said a prayer of thanks to the Universe that even though I may not be with you in this most difficult of times, you always have someone who cares. In a world where we no longer know our neighbors and almost everything has lost the personal touch, I marvel at how you have built an entire tribe of people who look at you with nothing but goodwill and gratitude. I still remember from childhood how at every supermarket or restaurant we went to, someone would recognize you and walk over to you to thank you for something you had done for them. In a world where impact is measured in revenue, you remain a rare outlier, still offering connection and compassion in return for very little money. When I was younger, I resented the fact that you charged so little for your services. So many of our problems seemed linked to money, and it seemed so foolish that you were "choosing" to earn less. But now, I see the real impact of your choices, and I think you make the world a better place. We need more people like you, and I pray and hope that you can work your magic for many years to come.

I also admire how much you care about the people you love and the depths of darkness you are willing to go through with them. If I had been in your place today, I don't think I could have done what you have. To watch your spouse turn into a helpless child, constantly screaming and brimming with anxiety, and then to stay with them through this darkness alone takes a special kind of strength. I definitely don't have this in me. I really wish you wouldn't be so hard on yourself in trying to save your loved ones. But you know no other way to live. When I think of these past three years, I remember a story you told me in my childhood. About a young boy preventing his town from being flooded by the ocean by sticking his finger in the dike and holding it there till help arrived. This is the closest and truest analogy I can think of for what you've done for me and my PhD. You are the one person who has stood between me and everything else that is crumbling around. The countless hospital visits you have handled alone, things breaking down at home, finances, chores, your work, your own illness, caregiving, the list is endless. The effort for you to go through all this and spare me is unfathomable, and I am simultaneously grateful and pained when I think of this. I am grateful because this is the only reason I am still on track to graduate, and yet I am pained because I have done so little to help you. 

In how you've led and continue to lead your life, you've taught me so much about resilience. In fact, you're the first person I think of when I hear the word. I've learned from you that we're so much more than our pain, illness, and problems. Even now, when I'm sick and need to do something, I try to channel you. I think of how gracefully you would handle it. Again, this is something I will never be able to fully emulate, and I sometimes think that we aren't even the same species. The rest of us have normal bodies that go through illness, injury, and pain, while you are just invincible. You don't even feel any of these things. But I've seen you closely, and I know you feel them just as much as the rest of us. You've just learned to have this effortless mastery over your body. Your mind is something special indeed. Your faith in dark times is something I scorned in my childhood as impractical and pointless, but having been through the bleakest of times now, I know the value of faith, especially an unwavering one like yours. I'm trying to follow in your footsteps now.

Like I once heard, even on my best day, I'm doing a poor imitation of you. You have set the bar so high, and you remain the best human being I'll ever know in this life. I hope, that someday, I can do for you a little fraction of what you've done for me. Wishing you a blessed birthday and a year that is less fraught! Sending you loads of love and gratitude!