Stay Close : Don’t Go Yet
“In response to Coffee Challenge: Why I want to be a better me in 2022”
I was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready, when I heard a strange baying, gurgling sound from the living room. I listened carefully. There was silence. I went on chopping and basting. The sound was repeated. Filled with a sense of deep foreboding, I dropped the spatula and knife, and ran into the room.
My husband was convulsing: he was trying to tell me something, but it came out in a deep moaning howl that struck terror in my heart. I tried to hold him so that he wouldn’t hurt himself, frantic, panic stricken, my limbs turning cold. His eyes were streaming, and he was flailing and thrashing. I held him, praying, “I don’t know what to do,” I sobbed. “I don’t know what to do.” My mother-in-law, in the beginning stages of dementia, had just come out of the washroom. She looked at us, and walked by.
I have never, ever felt so alone, as I did then. This man was my rock: he looked after people, even those people he scarcely knew. Those broad shoulders had borne me up whenever I had crumbled and crumpled. It was always, “tell me what’s wrong. I know a solution.” And he did. He is brave in a way that not many people I know are.
My world, as I know it, was collapsing around me. The sense that he was helpless smote me more than anything. I held him till he had quietened down, and collapsed on the sofa. Then, still holding him with one hand, I called up our family doctor. He didn’t reply, didn’t get back. It was a Sunday, I remember. 21st November. It was exactly a month after my husband’s emergency brain surgery, where he was operated on to remove clots on both sides of his brain.
Frantically, I called up my sister: she is a doctor in the Ford clinic, in Michigan. Then I called up my sister in law, another doctor, in Kerala, and then my son, another doctor, in Melbourne. Get him to hospital, they advised. Now. I rang up the man who drives our car: he reached home in five minutes. It was a Sunday. I called up the neurosurgeon, Dr Rajan Shah, my angel in human form, who had operated on him: he answered on the first ring. “Bring him to — -Hospital,” he said. “I shall reach in half an hour.”
Then I called up my friend, Neena, who calls me her elder sister. “Neena,” I told her, “I need you. Can you come?” “Yes,” she said simply.
We reached the hospital; Neena arrived soon after. That day, five vials of an anti epilepsy drug were injected into my husband. He told me later, much, much later, that it felt as though water was running into his brain and cascading through every one of his bodily systems. It was painful, he wept like a child. I struggled not to disintegrate. Neena stayed close. Saying nothing. Being my rock. That’s all I wanted.
I brought my husband back home, after five hours.
My husband had stopped smiling. Stopped surfing the Net. Stopped talking. Slept often, curled into foetal position or lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I stayed by his side almost 24/7, when I was not taking care of my mother in law, or dishing up something quick in the kitchen. That year, 2018, we had booked flight and coach tickets, and hotel accommodation to visit Tuscany, Pompei and Santorini. Quietly, I cancelled all of them.
It was the last week of December when my husband started smiling again. It felt like the Sun had risen again
That was my resolution, for 2019, and every year that has followed since: to keep that smile going, always.
My New Year Resolution is to stay grounded, stay grateful. I thank God for everything and everyone I have in my life, and take each day as it comes, trying to find that one bright spot in my day which makes life worth while, and letting go everything else which is either insignificant, or petty.
That is the kernel of my life: everything else, is chaff.
©️ 2021 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Shoutout to this eternally relevant piece by Ravyne Hawke, who adopted my words and gave them, and me, a home to come back to, in her publication, ‘Promptly Written’, when not many knew me, on Medium, and not many, cared.
