My father used to say that he prepares himself for the worst in a crisis so that he can cope well. In 2006, I had to be hospitalised with dengue. We were migrants in Delhi, so my brother had to call on my father for support. After I recovered, my father shared how he had managed to keep calm in a medical emergency like this. He had imagined life after losing his daughter, he said. To me, his words had appeared exaggerated at the time.
My parents used to talk about death a lot – mostly about how they lost their own parents. After they crossed 60 and retired, talk on death increased in frequency. Both were schoolteachers and retirement had served them a reminder that they had entered a final phase of life. My father’s advice of imagining one’s life after the death of a close one was on a to-do list somewhere in a corner of my mind. But whenever any of my parents had a troublesome medical episode, I began to think of his tip.
But in my imagination, things would not happen so fast. I always thought I would be given time to say the things I felt to my parents. I had imagined them sharing the ups and downs of their lives, too, in their final days. However, nothing happened the way I thought they would. We did not even have time to say goodbye to the two people who gave us life, who nurtured us and had even tried their best to prepare us for their own deaths.
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In September and October 2020, a tsunami hit our lives. On September 7, my mother complained of fever. Ten days later, on September 17, she took her last breath. It was COVID-19. For the sake of my toddler daughter, I was asked not to go home for her last rites.
Then, my father also tested positive for COVID-19 and his treatment started immediately under home isolation. He was responding well and for the next six days, he and I remained connected for the daily two-hour monitoring of his vitals. He was steady, even after losing his partner of 45 years and being in isolation.
When his oxygen levels started dropping, he was rushed to a private hospital in nearby Ranchi. After this, our communication was limited to a video call per day. It was mostly a one-way conversation. We spoke, he nodded. His hospitalisation saw several ups and downs. He was determined to fight, and we were able to procure everything that was needed – plasma for plasma-therapy, high end antibiotics and all other resources.
He showed some progress and gave us hope. We started planning how to take care of him once he was discharged. This planning helped us cope with the situation. But suddenly, he was put on the ventilator. He got better one day and worse the next. He took one step forward and two steps back for several days. Finally, on October 15, I lost my father too.
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That one month tested us in all possible ways – emotionally, financially and everything in between.
For the hospitalisation of both my mother and father, we had to run from pillar to post for ICU beds. But such tiring times also saw people come forward to support us. Once we exhausted our resources but needed more, many came forward. Many of our friends helped raise funds for us. The support was overwhelming and that kept us going.
Losing both parents to COVID-19 within a month was a pain worsened by the fact that I was hundreds of kilometres away. My role as primary caregiver to a toddler came before everything. Guilt, anxiety, and other emotions engulfed me at that time.
Questions such as, “will you get the ‘body’?” felt like needles. How people who die of COVID-19 lose their dignity in death was not unknown to us. We found solace in the fact that at least my brother got a chance to cremate my parents’ bodies.
I saw both cremations through video calls. I saw my brother wearing a PPE suit, listening to the priest and doing the rituals. After both the cremations, I was thinking only about my brother’s emotions. He might have felt the urge to hug Maa and Papa for one last time, to touch them and wish against hope that they would come back. But there he was, asked to follow strict protocols and do everything from a distance.
He, at a few metres’ distance, and I, several hundred kilometres away, felt at once the brutality of losing someone to COVID-19.
What followed, for me, was a journey in coming to terms with everything from a distance. It also made me rethink the way we see off our departed. In almost every culture, they are a family and community affair. The rituals to send off the dead made no sense to me as I was not able to do them or feel any of the comfort they provided.
People would ask if I was going home. I used to dread such calls. My head would go blank thinking about home. Which home? The home where I will not find my Maa and Papa?
What would have been going on in their minds during their isolation? When I told my father that he needed to be hospitalised, he was silent. He had seen his wife go the same way. What was he thinking while he had had to get ready for a two-hour journey to the hospital in Ranchi?
As a family we were encouraged to share our feelings, I feel suffocated now that I will not know of these last emotions that my parents felt. It breaks me to the core to imagine the cruel isolation this disease brought to my parents.
Families of patients with non-infectious illnesses get some time together. To heal, cry, laugh and prepare for the dreadfulness. But we did not get that. I grapple every day with the thought of my father in the ICU, surrounded by health workers in PPE, no family to hold his hand.
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Closer to their death, I was furious about the poor health care system of the town where my parents lived. I was aghast at the time private testing labs took to provide us with RT-PCR test results. The amount of resources needed even for admission to hospitals was astounding and made us think of privilege.
I had heard horror stories of neighbours making lives of COVID-19 patients families hell by blocking their food supply and bullying them. A family who has lost or is struggling to save their loved one from COVID-19 is already going through hell, and unscientific fear and stigma makes their suffering worse.
This horror has also created an unsaid solidarity among the families dealing with this pandemic first-hand. Each number in the COVID-19 death tally has a story of narrate – about struggles to survive, about racing against time to get tests done, securing an ICU bed, running out of all savings, facing stigma from the neighbours, not getting the time to stop for a minute, and not getting the time to hug your loved ones to say goodbye.
I lost my childhood, the warmth of my parents, their irritating habits all at once. Two most important people of my life are now two more numbers in the official count of COVID deaths.
I was not able to go and mourn with my immediate kin but in my thoughts, I am mourning together with so many people unknown to me, who have lost their loved ones to COVID-19.
My father was an ardent reader of Indian philosophy and he used to teach us his interpretation of several concepts. He would teach me that all humans are equal and are a mere part of the larger universe. He introduced me to the concept of Sohum, to identify oneself with the universe or ultimate reality.
The way Maa and Papa went, I did not get the time to use my father’s tried and tested advice on how to deal with adversity, but in this hour of loss, his teaching of Sohum is helping me as I identify myself with all the others whose loved ones are now numbers in the COVID-19 death tally. This solidarity has no boundaries.
Dr. Rani Rohini Raman is a researcher at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad. She works in the area of gender studies, urban studies, migration and public health.
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