Requiem for My Dad

I lost my father last Saturday. I'd like to dedicate this blog by offering some personal THANK YOUs to my Dad, as if he was here, listening. I would have written a song or hymn about him but I realised that I lack that talent.

THANK YOU for being my Dad, and for putting up with me when I was obnoxious, as I surely must have been, as an immature child without understanding you (sometimes I feel that I didn’t understand you even in your last days).

THANK YOU for being my first rhyme teacher, my first writing teacher, and my first teacher in the art of living with passion (enjoying food, dressing etc. and leading a superb lifestyle).

THANK YOU for being a perfectionist and an experimenter – who can forget that you employed an architect way back in 1970 to build your bungalow or insisted on having a Bay window when the concept itself was unheard of or placing a hatch from the kitchen to the dining hall or putting up a sand pit for children to play.

THANK YOU for sharing your love of music and violin playing and for being instrumental in me learning this great art and for exposing me to western hobbies like gardening and mushroom cultivation.

THANK YOU for being the one in our family who didn't criticize or ridicule other family members behind their backs (in spite of having to shuttle between different homes at a very ripe age, I had never seen you complaining about the food others made or the way they treated you).

THANK YOU for teaching me to be myself by being yourself.

THANK YOU for your tenderness, your toughness, your brilliance, your gentleness, your wisdom, your outrageousness, your courage, your intensity, your contradictions, your humor, sometimes your unreasonableness (all these seasoned me in life) and your unquenchable sense of trying out new things.

THANK YOU for taking care of yourself, even though it sometimes was misconstrued for selfishness by me, because taking care of yourself is the best gift you could have ever given me.

And now on death. Someone said "A painless exit is an index of how moral and helpful your earthly life has been." If I go by that both my parents had led an exemplary life.

Death makes you dive deep into parts of your soul where you don’t tread much. My father must have intuited his death timing. Which is why, according to my sister, he was talking a lot (a day earlier to his death) about many happenings in his life.

In the years before this day, due to a razor sharp mind in a fragile body, he had often asked if there was any way we could help him to live longer. He often suffered other health problems as a side effect of Parkinson’s disease. However, he was a happy and friendly man, who still enjoyed life’s good moments, family events, parties etc. He lived life to the full. When he went to a party, he exhausted himself so much he often had to “pay” for days afterwards.

I am sure he at one time had feared the anticipation of this great last step in life, but he died in peace, happy and content and grateful.

I hope I will one day be able to die up to his and my mother’s standards, in dignity. I hope my family will remember me for a few good things I did to them. A good death is like the final chapter of a good book: it wraps up the story of ‘life’ with panache, is physically, emotionally and spiritually satisfying to the author (the deceased) and the reader (kith and kin), and leaves no loose ends to be explained in a sequel.

If I go by this analogy of life to a book, I would like to read the last chapter of my book now. I would like to know when and where the chapter ends (though it is my book, someone is writing it!) and probably what the readers think about the book… my life. I know that predicting when and where of my death is impossible. A couple of years back I read the following.

“We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of The Astrological Magazine will cease with the December 2007 issue.”

Any comment on this is really superfluous.

But I would welcome some Epitaphs from the readers of my book. It would be great to know what people think of you when you die, when you are living!! If this sounds outrageous to you, that's okay. It is outrageous, especially when you consider our culture's pervasive denial of death.

Life is outrageous, and death is part of life. So some Epitaphs please!