My cellular calendar tells me HARK! Family birthdays….of a grandfather that I never knew and a sister that I adored, both lighting candles and toasting in other realms.
My younger sister, Margaret, left the planet thirty two years ago. She and I were comrades in joy and stormy blasts. As she was lifted up and out by a brain tumor, her parting accusatory words to my mother were: “This happened because you left me in boarding school.”
My mother inhaled these words and together the words and she joined in sorrow.
My father, forever in love with my mother from the moment that he met her, came up with a plan, and he called me.
He proposed that the three of us journey to the place that Margaret felt was the nucleus of her disease birth. Our boarding school in the Palni Hills of South India. He felt that perhaps walking this walk could loosen this albatross’ grip that was oozing my mother’s life force away.
My kneejerk response was ‘OF COURSE’…oh….but wait a minute. I am a single mother living in Charleston, South Carolina, with two teenage daughters and work that could not be walked away from without creating an avalanche of income obliterations.
We three met in Amsterdam and flew together to India.
Having lived there for years, we were more than familiar with the not-to-be-thought-possible scenarios that could appear any and every moment, but we had slipped into living the American reality, which is supremely different.
And then:
As we never had done ‘fancy’ in India, my father booked us into a modest hotel in Bombay and requested a bath tub for ‘the ladies’.
Knock knock knock on our door and a metal tub is hoisted at Dad. ‘Thank you!’.
Spluttering water from a tap and filling jugs to fill the tub. Mom and I both looking at each other and saying together “We’re back!”
Mom taking the first bath, and upon standing up is covered with black ‘something’….sigh. She scrubs herself off with water from the tap and exit the bath tub idea.
Dad disappears to fetch some tea while Mom and I drink in the vibes all ‘round and re-align ourselves with this land that was ours at one time.
Knock knock on the door, and we both go to answer.
No humans in sight, but outside of every door in the hallway, discarded food trays (room service?hah) and wild cats batting grapes up and down the hallway and occasionally crashing into a teacup, hence the ‘knock knock’.
Mom and I looked at each other and with a mutual explosion of ‘OH MY GOD! WE ARE BACK!’
I’m not sure either of us had ever laughed so hard, for so long…
The hilarity and beauty of life in the moment.
And yes….healing happened.