The Only Superhero I've Ever Known

A few years after your parents pass away, you start to realise that in a way, they aren't really gone. The things you learnt from them, the traits you subconsciously took from them and the memories you have of them mean that they continue to live through you even if they’re no longer around. 

 Humble Beginnings

When I sit back and remember my mother, I see a superhero in her own right. She was initially brought up in a very rural area in Pathanamthitta. As you can see from this image, the house was basically in the middle of a forest area.

My grandparents were both government teachers and back then, it was not a very rewarding job in terms of pay. Making their way up in life was a slow and difficult process that took decades. The family moved around a lot, I assume this was because of government transfer orders. A couple of years were spent in Palakkad. A few in Ernakulam. And finally, a house was bought in Trivandrum which is where my mother would spend the vast majority of her adult life.

My mother was always the studious type. She made a habit of acing all her exams and being a topper all the way from school to college. But her childhood was not without trauma. It was sometime when she was in high school that her father was diagnosed with colon cancer. It must have been a difficult few years and she never told me much about that time except for how much she missed him.

It was only when I visited some of my mother’s relatives a few years after her death that I understood just how difficult it was. My grandfather had to travel to Vellore for treatment. He had an operation done and had to live with a colostomy bag which certainly must not have been easy. He passed away a few years later while my mother was still in school. Up until her death, she never stopped missing him. He always had a huge influence on her life even after he was gone.

Life After Marriage

There are a lot of things that my mother did in the late 80s and early 90s that some of the more conservative members of society would find difficult to wrap their heads around even today. She prioritized her studies and her career over marriage. She even gave a shot at trying to get into civil service for a while but that unfortunately didn’t work out.

She finally got married at 29. I guess this is one of the reason why I can’t help but roll my eyes whenever I hear someone say “25 is too old to wait any longer to get married”. Bro, my mom went way further back before you were even born. This is not to say that my mother was some left-leaning liberal. She was quite conservative in her views but that didn't stop her being a strong, independent woman.

Unfortunately, things did not exactly go that well after marriage. It would probably be most appropriate to describe my parents’ marriage as loveless. For as long as I knew them, they had always stayed in different rooms. My father was not in a financially good position at that time. My mother had to sell some of her jewellery shortly after marriage to help him out. She never did forget that for years. My father was also not home for a long time in those early due to some other issues.

My mother was initially working in the finance department and some of the earliest memories I have of her were when she was going to work in Secretariat. Sometimes she would bring me along too (I must have been 4 or 5 at the time). But after a while, she started to realise that her heart was not really in that job.

She wanted to follow her father’s footsteps and get into teaching. So several years after marriage and having a child, she decided to leave a well paying government job to become trained as an English teacher. This meant that when I was around 7 or 8 years of age, she had to leave me with an elderly maid and go to Pattambi, which was on the other side of the state.

Sure, this probably wasn’t ideal for my growth at the time but looking back now, I feel happy and proud that my mother had the courage to actually go follow her dreams. Ultimately, there is more to life than just family and kids. If you aren’t happy how it’s going, you have every right to try and find something better. She did of course make sure that once she did become a lecturer, she got transferred to Trivandrum so that she could be close to me. Perhaps in the later years, she did try to overcompensate for being absent for those couple of years.

Cancer

In the few years after my father started being at home more, the marriage was still rocky to say the least. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments in there when it almost came to a complete separation. They went to a therapist a few times and then slowly over the years, the fights died down as the financial issues slowly got resolved (somewhat). Still, there is a reason why my mother left everything to me in her will.

I think it’s worth mentioning here the sheer amount of sacrifices that she made every single day for me. It is not at all easy balancing a full time job, being the main earner of the house and trying to raise a teenage brat like myself who had little interest in studies. She really was a superhero. Even after she got sick.

Ovarian cancer is a really awful disease. It starts off with such vague abdominal symptoms that people usually just ignore it until it spreads too far to control it. I was in 11^th std when she got diagnosed. She had an operation done but the true nightmare was chemo.

I can say with certainty that if it were me, I’d have gave up after the 1^st round of chemo and just accepted death over the side effects. But my mother was really something else. She powered through the pain, the nausea and vomiting, the diarrhea and the hair loss. It was a slow and painful journey through many months. But she finally got into remission. 

It was also around this time that I finally started to become more serious about life. Seeing your mother struggle like that does change you as well. It wasn't an overnight change like you see in the movies but it was a turning point in my life.

Everything wasn’t easy after remission though. She developed significant swelling of her leg as a complication post-surgery which always dampened her mood somewhat. She wanted to go back to exactly how she was before she was diagnosed and her leg was a constant reminder that that was never going to happen.

For all the problems that they had, my father was there for her right throughout this period. My father and I were often far from the perfect support group at times but we did try our best. The marriage was still mostly loveless but there was a stability in those last few years that was never there before. The arguments were far fewer.

It Came Back

That my mother was actually able to go back to work after such a harrowing ordeal is a testament to how strong a person she was. But life post-remission wasn’t entirely event free. She got a leg infection once and had to spend a couple of weeks in the ICU when I was in 2^nd year of medical college and was quite critical at the time. Of course, she still managed to recover and come back just as before.

It always makes me sad when I recall those times in the hospital because I remember how few people would come to visit her. By comparison, when my father had health issues, a massive crowd would often come to see him. It never really seemed fair to me.

My mother was never really a big believer in strong friendships, something which I vehemently disagreed with at the time (my experiences over the past 6 years have made me a different person now though). Perhaps it was because she was constantly moving all over the place in her life. Different districts, different jobs. It’s difficult to form meaningful friendships when you don’t stick around that long at a single place. And of course, in the later years she sacrificed much of her free time to do usual mother things.

Looking back, I find it incredible how she kept finding the will to overcome these health issues. The two things that kept her going was her love for teaching her students and her love for me. Sadly, 5 years after she was initially diagnosed, the cancer came back. This time, it had spread to many organs.

The only reason I even joined medicine was because of my mother. Otherwise, I’d probably be writing columns for the Quint or something right now. Whenever I used to get stressed during exams, she was always there for me as a pillar of support. The tragedy was that she would not live to see me graduate let alone see me at AIIMS.

Both I and she knew that recurrence was horrible news. Her mind simply did not accept this. She went into denial claiming the diagnosis must be wrong and that she had already defeated cancer. She just didn’t want to go through the agony of those painful treatments once more.

I managed to talk her into getting treatment again although in hindsight, I’m not sure how good a decision that was. I knew things were bad but I never could imagine my life without her. I didn’t have the maturity back then nor did I have the wisdom of a practicing doctor. So when she did pass away, I was still shocked, sad and in tears. Her funeral was one of the worst days of my life.

Sacrifice

A little less than a year after my mother passed, my father would get a massive stroke that left him bedridden and with some degree of dementia. The next few years for me was all about sacrificing the things I used to enjoy – eating out, new clothes, sports, free time, career growth – in order to provide for my father. The only thing I regret from that time is however, not being able to do more.

In a way, I made some of the same sacrifices my mother made for me over the years. The main difference being that I was not able to elegantly maintain a sense of control over life that she used to have. No matter how much I had sacrificed, money was always scarce and I was never far away from having to ask for loans from relatives & friends.

But I did try. And if you think that my moral compass today is pointed somewhere in the right direction then that is mostly thanks to my mother. Like how she never truly got over her father’s passing, there is not a day that goes by without me wondering how much better my life would be if she was still be around today.