Quietly they go, the brave
Ten days after my mother passed away, I had a dream about her. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, and we were trying to feed her. She was being difficult, and I was rolling my eyes, and my sister was scolding her. I kept saying, "Ammu, you have no idea how ill you were, what you put us through. We almost lost you."
My mother was smiling.
It's not unusual that I would dream this. When my mother told us in early May that she had been diagnosed with cancer, this is what I had anticipated: that she would be in the hospital; that she would refuse to take her illness seriously or listen to the doctors; that I would roll my eyes a lot, and be stressed out. When she told us, we were upset, but not unduly worried. She had cancer. But this was my mother. She would beat it. She could beat anything.
When someone you have known all your life passes away, you can't really recollect specific memories that you had in any synchronised way. They come in ebbs and flows: the sound of the brakes of her car as she would screech to a halt in front of our house; her walking very fast in front of me as I struggled to catch up with her at Dhaka's New Market, when we went to buy books for summer vacation; calling the operator at her university, asking for 'ammu'; my mother singing on her harmonium, or her singing along to her favourite Police track; and most recently, of the last time she came to see us in Bangkok; me bathing my newborn, and my mother standing behind me, watching and smiling, saying in her childlike way, "You know how to do this!"
The childlike voice never fooled us; her simplicity never had us believing she didn't know any better. My mother, Khaleda Ekram, was the toughest woman I knew. A slender woman, almost wraith-like in her final years, my mother to us was a figure larger than life.
Born into a family of four sisters, and parents who valued education above all else, my mother chose to pursue architecture, the only woman in a class of 25, and she excelled. Through great personal losses in those early years, with her mother and two sisters dying within the span of a year, she went to the US to study an MA. My parents were batch mates, and we would often hear stories of those glory days, of the love that they shared for each other, and their passion for their work. Even though that story did not have a happy ending, I often imagine my parents in their student days: her in bell-bottoms, and him with big curly hair, at the heart of feminist movements and liberal ideologies.
I have been trying to keep my mother alive, if only in my mind.
I Google her name to read the tributes that have poured in, go over all her recent emails to me obsessively. In one of the emails, my mother wrote: "Never give up; only cowards and losers do that." I am not even sure what she was referring to, it was a continuation to a conversation we had earlier, but this was my mother. All through her life, she insisted on higher education for all three of her children, and the need for women to be equal contributors to society; she broke gender stereotypes, and taught us to be confident in making our own decisions.
When she was appointed Vice Chancellor of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, we were proud but not surprised. And true to herself, my mother faced every adversity headfirst, and carried on working with a steely determination till the last day her cancer permitted her to remain standing. Iron Lady, is what they were calling her at the university; something I've discovered on the social media networks in the weeks after her death.
In our conversations, my mother would let down her guard, laugh in her girlish way, and tell us anecdotes about how 'naughty' her students could be. And in her hospital bed in those ten days, whittled down to a mere shadow by one medical complication after another, she still fought till the last minute.
My mother was a lioness, a warrior.
Grief is a strange thing, it is unquantifiable, inconsistent. The last three weeks have been like moving through thick air, when you literally have to command your hands and feet to make the next motions.
My son is a feisty toddler of 15 months now, the one who makes me laugh and play with him even when I am feeling my grimmest, and right then, I can almost make myself believe that everything is normal. Till I realise he'll never know her. In moments like this, I wonder what my mother would have told me. She would have been brisk, businesslike. She would have said, "Yes, the worst has happened, but it's over, so get on; you have a family to look after, work to finish, and a degree to pursue. Don't waste time." As an afterthought, she would have said something random like "don't hunch, stand tall."
In the aftermath of a storm, the night was cool, and there was a gentle breeze and a lone bird watching as we buried our mother. It was quiet, hundreds of people hanging back, to give our family some space as we put her in the ground with her mother. I stood tall.
The writer is Khaleda Ekram's younger daughter, and a Public Health Specialist pursuing a Doctoral degree.
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