I was about eight or nine years old, I think. Dad was in the local hospital for a surgery, and I recall going there with my mother. In the room adjacent to dad's was a young fellow, barely a year or two older than me, who, I was told, was rapidly nearing the end of his life because of "blood cancer." A phrase that I would come across quite often in movies with a melodramatic tune in the background, and here was a kid like me who really had it. And was dying.
It scared the shit out of me--that I could die. Of blood cancer. In a culture where nobody talked about anything openly, I had to deal with this scare by myself. (My other big scare then: after watching a Godzilla movie, I trembled quite a few nights thinking that any moment those creatures would come get me!)
Even now the kid, frozen in time in my memory, but whose face has completely faded out, is a reminder of how much we are cartons with expiration dates of our own.
A few years later, in the middle of my teenage years, I was in the taxicab as we took grandma to the same hospital. We had been through the drill a few times--her enlarged heart would every once in a while make it extremely difficult to breathe, which then required a couple of days of appropriate medication in the hospital. But, this time, as we were driving--mom in the back with grandma and me in the front with the driver--grandma stopped breathing. And that was it.
It was quite a revelation that death could happen that fast.
Grandma's death anniversary is a couple of days away. Some memories don't fade away, and I am thankful they don't.
No comments:
Post a Comment