THE LIMITS OF HOPE

I am very hopeful these days that my mother with recover to some extent at least. Yesterday when I said 'I love you mummy,' she made a sound in her throat. I thought it was accidental, and repeated myself and she did the same. I was certain she was trying to say 'I love you too.' She had done this in the hospital on the second day of her stroke, said 'I love you too.' I was thrilled because whenever I said those three words her response was always 'thank you.' Those were in fact the last words I heard her say before she slid further into her stroked brain -- who knows where? I was very happy yesterday, like a child. Strange how the mother child bond never changes in a way. Though she is now my child she is still my mommy.

But later in the later, watching her slumped in her wheelchair like a sack I despaired that she wasn't going to make it. My spirits slumped, too. The fact remains that even if she recovers to some extent (my hope is that she will recover the way our friend Arny's mother, who had a stroke at 93, like my mother, recovered after her stroke, and was around for another five years), her demise is inevitable. In all this yo-yoing between hope and despair I have to keep this inevitability always in view. Hope, no matter how strong, has its limits, and unless we reconcile ourselves to the death of a loved one, we will be imprisoned in our attachment to them. All the sages say attachments that make you sink (in the words of Guru Nanak) in scalding waters are to be avoided. What this means to me is this: that one does absolutely everything possible to give the loved one a fighting chance to survive but not be attached to the outcome. This, of course, is also the lesson of the Bhagavad Geeta. It is worth keeping in mind and living by.