July 8. At about 5:45 am, Natasha called me. My phone was set to vibrate, and I am usually a light enough sleeper that a vibrating phone will wake me. I must have been exhausted, because her call, and a subsequent call from Dabloo, didn’t wake me. Just before 6 am, I started and woke…

I had taken some time off from writing about Ma. It was the end of the year, when everyone seems to be celebrating, and the contradiction between what I could see outside, and how I felt inside, was just too much to bear. I visited Europe, first alone, to Romania, to look at where we…

Ma’s next chemo session, with both of her drugs, didn’t go well. The side-effects were serious enough that she was in misery. By the middle of January 2015, her oncologist, while still being somewhat circumspect, had started giving us signals that she was beginning to experience complications. In the latter part of that month, Ma…

As I write this today, it is 6 November, 2015, Papa’s 71st birthday. Ma’s is 12 November. Since she went away, we have had a few birthdays in the family, but this is the time she will be missed the most. Varun, Dabloo’s son, was born on 25 September. His birthday starts the season of…

Over the next weeks, the two things that we found out for sure about my mother were: She had a very high threshold for pain and discomfort This was not always a good thing Her chemotherapy started on 10 July 2014. She wasn’t afraid of hospitals, needles, and medicine, having had a great deal of…

A PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan works on the scientific principle that cancer cells, because they are dividing rapidly, need to use more energy (really, sugar) than normal cells. By injecting a suspected patient with a radioactive solution that is essentially a mix of sugar, radiologists can pick up the degree of absorption of sugar…

Now that Varun’s ceremony, and all the attendant activity, was over, life returned to a more measured pace. My mother liked visiting new places. For years, my parents had been visiting us in Atlanta, and I had never really made an effort to arrange to take them on a holiday. Certainly, we had gone to…

Every year, more or less, my parents visited us in Atlanta. My brother, Prashant, lives a few miles from me, so it was a family reunion when my parents visited. They would split their stay between my house and his. This year, in 2014, Prashant (or Dabloo, as he is called at home) had a special occasion.…

It has been just over two months since my mother left us. To be honest, she didn’t really leave. She breathed her last. She traveled to her heavenly abode, if I were to use the type of florid prose I have seen used. She passed away, or passed, as the abbreviated US form says. She…