On Grief and Loss

Enchiladas suizas, a Victorian house, and a death in the family.

My mom and me.

Sausage and peppers – East Village take out window, 1965.

Enchiladas suizas – Mexican place across the street from Swami Satchidananda’s ashram, Upper West Side, 1974.

Black daal – restaurant at the National Sports Club of India, Bombay, 2005.

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Three months ago my mother was in the hospital telling me about the mental list she’d been making of the best meals of her life.

A week later my sister and I watched her take her last breaths.

We stood on either side of her hospital bed, staring at her as her breathing slowed down.

Eyes closed. Mouth open. Tongue moving in the back of her throat on every exhale. Or was it every inhale? It’s hard to remember.

The spaces between breaths got longer and longer. They became so long that my sister and I kept snapping our heads up to look at each other, worried each breath was her last. Until finally once it was.

It’s a strange thing to watch your mother die. It feels horrific but natural, unseemly but sublime. My aunt said, “She brought you in and you brought her out.” There’s a kind of beauty in that.

Time warps around death. An hour at the hospital gets mistaken for a week; two days back in Los Angeles is eight years. Nothing makes sense.

I was a wreck at the hospital, shamelessly crying in the hallway until a nurse steered me to the family waiting room and a box of tissues, but afterward I was composed and efficient. There’s a lot to be done when someone dies – things to donate, wills to execute, memorials to plan.

And the house.

My mother still lived in the house I grew up in – an old Victorian with a wraparound porch, pocket doors, cast iron radiators. A house more like a family member than a structure. A house that could be a vortex or a sanctuary depending on your mood.

“I don’t want to die in this house!” my mother would say when she felt like moving out, followed almost immediately by, “I can’t leave this house. It would rip out my soul.”

Her indecision was next level, in every area of life. I think the only decision she ever really made was her Ukrainian exit at the hospital.

So now it’s up to me and my sister to go through a lifetime of things. Selling the house will be its own death. I’ve been thinking about what it must have felt like for my ancestors to leave their homelands, knowing they would never return. It’s not the same, but maybe this is touching on some deep ancestral wound that desperately needs healing.

I started writing this three days after my mother passed. I wanted to come to some kind of clean conclusion, to be able to wrap everything up nicely. But life is messy and death is surreal.

I came across this line in my notes, and it feels like a good place to end:

The body is just an interface for consciousness to interact with the world.

I hope it’s true.

Until next time,

Tara