Even in her final days, Mom was smiling.
Alzheimer’s robbed her of so much: memories, mobility, speech, independence. But it could not steal her smile. When her eyes fluttered open, when she spotted a loved one by her bedside, her lips and dimples revved to life.
When Guli Menon was a little girl in Kolkata, everything made her laugh.
I once asked her to explain these giggle fits. She thought for a second and said, maybe a headmaster came into class and nearly tripped? Maybe one of her six siblings cracked a joke so unfunny she found the silence hilarious? Maybe a stray dog looked like it was about to talk? Maybe a bus backfired and scared the rickshaw drivers?
She burst into laughter recalling her own maybes.
On the evening of May 19, I met my two younger brothers, Arun and Kris, at our childhood home. The palliative team warned the end was near. We gathered around Mom’s bed. We held her hand. We kissed her forehead. We read her favourite poems.
We promised to love her forever. Then she took her final breath.
It’s strange how grief can stir up memories. Walking around my old neighbourhood in recent months, I could hear the old road hockey games and bike races. I could see the kids playing marbles and climbing trees. There is Mom, wandering out to say it’s dinnertime. There she is in the spring, summer, winter and fall, our indomitable mother, casting a shadow of warmth with that powerhouse smile.
Mom never parented by fiat — she encouraged with praise.
When Arun was applying to law schools, she told him his legal mind was sharper than Clarence Darrow’s. When Kris decided to start his own business, she told him every other business might as well shut down because he was ascendant. When I expressed interest in journalism, she told me creative fulfilment was more important than making money.
That time we both laughed.
Mom could inject a sense of occasion into any mundane situation. A hot dog dinner felt like a King Henry VIII banquet as she regaled us with enchanting stories. Her Scrabble parties were as competitive as the Olympics, especially when the wine started to luge.
She loved and laughed, even while enduring a grim cascade.
I’m trying to not rage at the universe. We all lose our parents. But, really, universe? The unspeakable cruelty of Alzheimer’s after breast cancer and a mastectomy? A fall down the stairs that caused hairline fractures to her sternum and skull?
Why, universe, did you target an English postgrad obsessed with romantic poetry and snatch her ability to read?
When we were growing up, Mom never raised her voice. Three hellions and our friends ran buck wild in the house. She sat on the couch in serenity, drinking tea and reading Percy Bysshe Shelley. The only time a flash of disappointment crossed her face is when I forgot to set the VCR to tape “General Hospital” before rushing off to high school.
That was her guilty pleasure upon returning from work as an ESL teacher.
Telling her I forgot was harder than if I had to say, “Mom, I totalled the car.”
I didn’t realize how many lives Mom touched until her life ended. But even at a young age, I sensed the unusual. Strangers would talk to her in grocery stores. Clerks gave her mysterious discounts when we were buying back-to-school supplies. When she was in the backyard, even the squirrels wanted to be close.
She took an active interest in our lives. Before returning to the workforce, she volunteered in the school library and spearheaded bake sales. She went on class trips and was a Beaver Scouts leader. The only thing she frowned upon was going to hockey games, mostly because she found the Cummer Park Arena intolerably cold.
After more than a half century on this continent, Mom still feared winter.
In addition to the giggle fits, she also had superstitions. To this day, I do not clip my fingernails after sundown or step over the torso of someone sprawled on the floor.
I’m sometimes amazed at how my parents, then in their 20s, got on a plane for the first time after accepting scholarships in Ohio. They left their family and friends in India, in search of opportunities for the children they did not yet have.
There were times when Mom desperately missed her sisters and brother. I could see it in her eyes when she read their letters. But she loved the life she chose — and loved Canada for granting it. She always told us to be grateful to the universe.
As her cheeks started to cool and her breathing eerily synced with the oxygen machine, I rested the side of my head on her heart for a moment. The long goodbye was over.
Photos of her life and family surrounded her bed.
In every shot, she is beaming.
