Uma Girish - Losing Amma, Finding Home: A Memoir About Love, Loss and Lifes Detours

Uma Girish is a certified dream coach, grief guide, author, speaker and bereavement volunteer in a hospice. She is passionate about helping women find meaning in their loss and awaken to new purpose. Her writing has been published in seven countries and several of her short stories have won awards. Uma writes a grief blog called The Grammar of the Grief and hosts a weekly eponymous Internet radio show for the Creating Calm Network on Blog Talk Radio. She also facilitates a grief group at a retirement community. You can contact Uma at www.umagirish.com

With exquisite detail and total compassion, Uma sculpts the heartbreak of losing her parents and finding the beauty of the spiritual blessing that comes from a broken heart. She allows the reader to feel her pain and walk with her as she breaks through to the glorious side of Gods love. Sharing the differences of the Hindu culture with the American way of death, Uma gives us a clear picture of the universal potential of grief: moving forward to serve all mankind with unconditional love. Thank you, Uma, for sharing your courage and wisdom.

Lo Anne Mayer,
author of Celestial Conversations:Healing Relationships
After Death

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Copyright Uma Girish 2014

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors
own and the facts are as reported by her. They have been verified
to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way
liable for the same.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in
the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored
in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for
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embodied in articles and reviews without prior written
permission of the publisher.

Authors photo courtesy: Tiffany Joe Bibby

ISBN 978-93-81398-80-7

Printed and bound at
Rajkamal Electric Press, Sonepat, Haryana (India)

To Amma and Appa my wings and my roots
thank you for letting me
soar in uncharted skies

A HEARTFELT THANK YOU TO MY WRITING BUDDIES WHO helped shape and craft this book with critiques, coffee and comfort: Sheri, Chris, Rita, Emily, Sandi and Sharon.

I would also like to thank Sanjana, Tulika, Ravi and the entire Hay House team for making my dream come true in the best possible way.

Thank you, Girish for always holding my hand, and Ruki for sharing my love of writing.

27 January 2009

AS I WALK OUT FRESH FROM A SHOWER FOLLOWING A sweaty session with a Jane Fonda DVD, I dont have the faintest inkling that eight thousand five hundred miles away, on the other side of the world, my mother is breathing her last.

It is a raw January morning in a Chicago suburb. My fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruki, a high school sophomore, is away at school. My husband, Girish, is in Indianapolis on a business trip, and expected home in a few hours.

My brother, Mahesh, called last night, expressed a dilemma familiar to immigrants with an ailing parent overseas. Should he book his ticket, get on a plane to Chennai, so our youngest sister, Maya, who is holding the fort will feel supported? Or should he wait a couple more days? Something nagged at him, he said, a strange, unnamable feeling urging him to go. And yet, there are practical considerations. He has a wife who doesnt drive, a toddler, and a twenty-two-hour journey across the oceans. Like any responsible husband/father/employee, he needs to consolidate: balance affairs at home and the workplace and apply for a leave of absence before he books his ticket.

Sleep on it. Sometimes, things look clearer by the cold light of day, Id offered, unsure myself.

Now, my landline is ringing. I grab it, fully expecting to hear his voice.

Mahesh, I say.

Nothing else about that call is expected not my brothers tone, nor his words, or the meaning they convey. Nothing. It is the wrong phone call on the wrong day at the wrong time.

Uma, he starts gingerly. After a long pause, he speaks the words that break me; tear me limb from limb; splinter my soul. Ammas left us.

What?

It is a combination of stunned disbelief and certain knowing coalescing into that single-syllable word. It is all I can muster during such a momentous occasion, as my world tilts on its axis. It will be a long time before it rights itself, if ever.

I hear him, his words rushing past my bewildered brain, like the landscape outside a train window. Brace yourself calm down take it easy.

I had spoken to Amma just three days ago. The tired drawl in her voice was a red flag of sorts, but when I mentioned it to Maya (whom my parents lived with), shed attributed it to the meds; said they made Amma woozy. I bought into it readily, shrugged off the concern, comfortably slid to the corner called denial, preferring to hide there, far away from the light.

My cell phone rings; it is my brother-in-law from Chennai.

I can barely remember how the phone conversation with Mahesh ends.

I feel heavy, weighed down by raw emotion. As my brother-in-law starts to speak, I say to him, Yeah, I know. Mahesh just called me, flinching from yet another repetition.

How did this happen? I wonder aloud, knowing he cannot possibly have the cosmic consolation I seek. I ask to talk to Maya who is falling apart in a friends arms at Santhosh Hospital where Ammas cold, lifeless body lies.

Thousands of miles away from each other, connected by a fragile transatlantic connection, we cry together.

I hang up and sink down to the carpeted floor of the living room numbed, shaken, terrified. When I manage to pick myself up, I rush to the altar and rage at God. How can I go on without her? I ask a mute Higher Power. Id never imagined a world without her. Who do I call when I need a home remedy for a tummy ache? Or a recipe when friends are coming for dinner? I switch on my laptop. Her gentle smiling face is my screensaver. I weep like a child.

Through the fog clouding my brain, I know I have to call Girish. I try his cell phone thrice. Each time I hear his voicemail say he cant take my call. What kind of a message do you leave in these circumstances? Hi, Im calling to say Amma passed away at half-past nine in the night India time. Please call me back when you have a moment.

Outside the window, piles of snow border the curb. A white blanket smothers the life of the grassy slope, shrouds the picnic table and benches. Stark-limbed trees stand bereft, mirroring my mood. All alone in my apartment, I alternate between heaving sobs and a strange, frightening calm when I cant feel my own heartbeat.

My mind rewinds to that beautiful, bright summer day only eight months ago 25 May 2008 when the e-mail arrived. It came from Maya, hurling through cyberspace at the gentle click of a mouse button, dropped into my inbox without as much as a whisper. But the power it had, to turn my new life one hundred and eighty degrees is not something Im likely to forget for a long, long time.