Mother's Day Post

 Today is Mother's Day. I think.

So I want to write down this memory. The last week of my Mom's life I was working in Alwaye with my father-in-law, which is six hours from Thiruvananthapuram where my home was with her and Dad. I had my first job and would go Sunday night and stay in Alwaye in YMCA and come back on Friday. It was just two weeks I had been doing this if my memory is correct. So as I was going on Sunday the third week she asked will you come back by any chance before Friday? I said no Mom, will come back on Friday as usual, can't come mid week no? She said ok with her usual Mona Lisa smile that I could never fathom. So that week one day I was standing in class teaching Rabbi ben Ezra by Robert Browning which I had never before and it went "Grow old with me/ the best is yet to be/ the last of life/ for which the first was made."

It ended with these words: "So, take and use Thy work:

Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!"

After teaching I went to the staff room and a message came that my mother had had a heart attack and was in the ICU due to a cardiac arrest via the phone. My father-in-law and mother-in-law took the car instantly and drove me down. I knew she was gone before the next call came because of the poem. Sometimes God lets you be right there with your loved one as he or she is dying and sometimes not but my comfort was the words of the poem which is why I believe God can speak to us not only from Scripture but at opportune moments through literature by great poets. The poem is a startling parallel to my mother's life in some ways who was a deeply spiritual person.

When she asked me if I would go back midway in the week by any chance did she know or did she not? I don't know, of course, I will never know, But the fact that I was teaching Rabbi ben Ezra while she was breathing her last makes me feel she did as it was a poem I had neither read nor taught before but as if made for her and to make me know what was happening somehow. Did not seem like any coincidence, strangely enough. I am not trying to put an(y kind of an) aura around this.

You can read the poem if so inclined.