The Last Days of My Father

 

My father was an independent man—intelligent, self-contained, and dignified. Age bent him, but it did not diminish him. Even as his body weakened, his mind remained alert, quietly amused by the world.

Toward the end, his complaints sounded ordinary enough: cough, loose motions, breathlessness, low blood pressure, swollen legs. Nothing that suggested an ending. When the ambulance was called, he dressed carefully, as he always did—full-length trousers, belt, tucked-in shirt, shoes. He looked as if he were going somewhere important.

Carried down from his second-floor home with no lift, he was placed into the ambulance. As we drove through the streets of Mulund, sirens blaring and traffic parting, we exchanged amused glances.

“What drama,” I said.

He smiled and asked if people were moving aside to let us pass.

In the hospital, they took him to the ICU. Machines replaced conversation. Procedures followed procedures. On the second night, ICU psychosis set in—restless, frightening, stripping him of peace and dignity. What medicine was doing to him felt harsher than what illness had done. By the fourth day, the doctors spoke carefully, hinting rather than saying. We were advised to take him home.

At home, with oxygen and a nurse, his body weakened steadily. Yet something else appeared—a distance, a calm, as if he were already loosening his hold on this world. One evening he stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, seeing what we could not. I asked him what my grandparents were telling him.

“They said stay a few days more, then come.”

My mother, I asked.

“She is not saying anything.”

His brothers?

“They have forgotten.”

Another day he said, very clearly, “Freedom.”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Freedom,” he repeated.

One evening, I placed holy ash on his forehead and told him I had spoken to Ramana Maharshi, that he would take care of him. “Go rest at his feet, Appa,” I said. After a pause, he spoke his last words:

“Ramana Maharshi.”

He died the next morning.

For sixty-seven years, he had been my pillar of strength. In the end, neither age nor illness defeated him as much as a medical system that used its tools and procedures without sufficient regard for frailty or the person bearing it. Medicine has immense power, but when attention shifts from the patient to the process, the cure can become harsher than the ailment itself. I took a walking, talking father to the hospital. Five days later, I brought home a man who was ready to leave.

When you sit beside a dying beloved, the world feels like a carpet of fallen autumn leaves—silent, fragile, final. It seems as though this is the whole story. But if you lift your gaze, you see the tree still standing. New leaves are already forming, young and green, catching the sunlight. Life continues, without explanation, alongside loss.

That knowledge does not lessen grief.

But it allows us to endure it.