My mother died this month.

She used to say, after her own mother died, that the sense of having a home base was gone for her. I get it now. The rest of us just aren’t equipped to reach out in the way she used to, and that’s okay, there is no substitute for chatting with one’s own mother anyway.

But I am left with an ugly grief which I had tried to prep myself for for years. I knew that she would likely pass with me being far away; I knew I would likely not be able to attend the funeral rites in person; I knew that, thanks to Covid, plus her poor health and mine, plus my own intense parenting duties, that I would most likely not have seen her for ages and would not again; I knew that all this would leave me in a world of pain. I knew all of it. And it still hurts worse than I ever dreaded.

One way of coping has been to hold the grief at bay somewhat. I tell myself that nothing is different, she and I were forced to accept mutual parting years ago; I tell myself that the life I am living is worthy of how she raised me to be, even though the separation was cruel; I allow the dissociative fog to envelop me, and just do the tasks in front of me. I saw her do the same when I was a kid, when her mother passed. Of course, I wake up and remember that she’s gone, and shards of glass seem to stab me in my heart, rendering me unable to even look at my face in the bathroom mirror. The days go by, and I realize that I cannot send her a funny video that she would have laughed at.

Another coping tactic has been to remember everything. She had such strong opinions about stuff, it’s easy to take note of something and go “Amma would have scoffed at that,” or “Amma would have found that hilarious.”

Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, I don’t know, but I remember a lot. I am like the family memory chest. I remember things with no effort, things that are boring even. I even remember the times when someone told me a version of events, and I didn’t believe them. I remember when people were afraid, and concealed it behind rage. I remember when we laughed because it was better than crying, and I remember when I hated that in us.

I remember how we used to sing bhajans, and sometimes I had to use my hand to indicate when to go lower, and she would laugh in recognition of my conducting. I cannot sing without crying these days, and even then, I remember when the same happened to her after her mother died. She would get lost in weeping when she tried to sing, and I thought how poignant and childlike she seemed in her sorrow, and I feel that way now. I remember my mother’s soft skin. I remember the sound of her beautiful gold jewelry. I remember.

The third tactic I’ve been employing is to remind myself that not being able to be there for the death rites is trivial when placed beside a lifetime of intimate relationship. Some days it even works, and soothes my heart for a time. At other times, I rage against the strictures by which I have to abide, and nothing can console me. Every reassurance lands like a falsehood. All I can do then is hold myself. When I glance at myself in the mirror, my eyes look empty. It’s still better than lying to myself with philosophies.

For the past year, I have had the good fortune of being in a support group. In one of our meetings, the group leader asked us to think of an ancestor who wished for us, and write briefly what came to mind.

I froze for the first few minutes. No one came to mind. Growing up in such a conservative patriarchy, who would have wished for a fourth girl? Anything I wrote would have been a fiction. So I took a different path. I thought of my maternal grandmother, and I knew she didn’t wish for me personally, but I knew that I had created a very different life path for myself with the wider range of choices available to me (relatively), and that was enough to complete the exercise. But it hurt.

Thinking about it later, I realized that I have always constructed my own narratives and realities. There is a kind of liberation in that. For one thing, it has allowed me to imagine what being a parent who accepts the unexpected could look like. It has freed me somewhat from the fetters of caste (none of us can be completely free of that as long as it exists). It has helped me to be gentle with the parts of me that have not been treated with kindness by society. It strengthens me to choose being outside of community, rather than to dwell in it while my children are left outside of it. It has helped me perceive the root of people’s behavior so I can choose how to engage with it (or not).

And finally, I am the age that my mother was when I was a young adult. I saw back then how she did not always get chances to nurture herself through menopause. Some of that was self imposed, some imposed by religious and social obligations; she had a lot of discipline about routines, and often pushed herself to meet her own high standards, which exacerbated the conditions that led to her disability later.

So I have made the decision to care for myself at this phase of my life. It is a house of autism cards most of the time, but I am tackling all my health related issues within those parameters of always prioritizing autism life; making sure to have time to myself; saying no to interactions that will harm me; saying yes to scenarios where people will show me love; accepting help; learning to say things with the help of therapy; refusing to dissociate from what remains of my own life.

It is not a straight line to “This is what Amma would have wanted.” Some of what I am doing, she would decidedly not have been interested in. But being able to say That’s okay, it’s what I want–that’s liberation too. Not everything I do has to be familial or communal. It can be just for me.

My mother loved, and was loved by, so many people. She took up physical and psychic space in a community that doesn’t always care to place value on the women who keep everyone together, whose cooking binds us all to heritage, who don’t get to demand dignity, self determination, or privacy. She took up that space anyway.

I remember.

Radha.