The breathlessness shouldn’t have harassed me at a time when I hoping to relax in the retreat of my wife’s impressions and her caring smiles. The resistance in the way I was breathing, I could sense a mild fury building up inside me. The discomfort caused by breathing problems is always annoying. It weakens the body, exhausts you quickly, handicap you temporarily not allowing you to participate in any of your routine chores. All the hints and manner of wheezing confirmed me the warning: I’m in for a hard hit of an asthmatic attack: a debilitating ordeal I’m not ready to face, at least the next five days. Brushing aside the slight discomfort, I’m prepared to brace myself summoning all my reserve of light-mindedness, to mark my wife’s first anniversary with grace and tribute recollecting the wonderful person she is.
The formal ceremonial rituals are just two days ahead; the early morning as I woke up I could recognize the dreaded first sign: the shortage of breath. It is like taking in punches in the stomach at a regular frequency. I feel like filling in my lungs but the air seems caught midway in the throat. As if my throat was tied tight with a cord. The whole effort, the strain of gasping, as the day progressed, is slowly starting to sap my stamina. I’m using now the emergency medical kit, the nebulizer, to ease up the hovering asthma attack. Being a chronic asthmatic I always keep handy the bronchodilators. Mercifully, it has been more than six years that I had gotten any need for them. I’m trying my best to stay less uncomfortable when I found that aerosol medications being pumped into the lungs seemed having no relief as I expected, if any, only temporarily. I could notice the exertion slowing showing in my words and moments. And heaving around my chest became deeper and labored.
Just two days to go, I’m done with the ‘to do checklist’ for the arrangements: preparations to mark the first annual ceremony of my wife, and enough cash drawn from the bank in the pocket. For this occasion, I find some comfort in my mind and deeds. I have a hidden reason for the reprieve that I firmly maneuvered to have to earn it.
For one year I buried one remorse lump deep within my folds of helplessness. It was hurtlingly disturbing even to admit it for myself. This dark blot of misgiving left a profound blister on my moral cover; on my very attachment, I had with my wife. Whenever I come to think about it I’m shamefully silent about its existence; a fact I felt if anyone would ever understand if I open up and share my source of this deep flowing malaise. The sentiment was, “I couldn’t able to give a decent burial to my wife”, as I had got it done to my father and my mother”.
Social compulsions, community norms, and customs compelled me to follow the order of the day. I know I’m doing it against my wishes, not worthy of how I’m supposed to lay her to rest. On the day it turned out to be a truly agonizing point in my life how I have become so disabled and taken by principled liableness. Never had I thought that my pride would ever touch such embarrassing rock-bottom and my helplessness so awfully handicapped. Finally, I consigned my wife to her final resting place in a decent enough way and site. But the muffled defeat I have holed up in me for eleven long months.
For eleven months, I was told I couldn’t approach the grave for any supplanting of the ‘remains’. But today I’m comforted with a redeeming sentiment; I have now built a sanctum: a shrine for my wife. A hallowed place where my memories and her blessed presence can meet every day! Located in the school where she worked for thirty years and barely two hundred feet from where I live. And preparations are on the go for the grand unveiling of the memorial. Relief, comfort, peace is now ready to join me.
Exertion started feeling heavy and breathlessness is causing enough discomfort, I’m hardly able to stand or see anything clearly. “Let me see my doctor once and ask for one quick dose of a strong steroid for an instant relief” I assured myself thinking one visit to the hospital would make me feel right for the moment. Thoughts swirling around the next two-day program I rushed to the hospital, where I was a VIP patient, laid down in the emergency room for more than an hour, got all the vitals checked and took a shot of steroid injection. I reasoned for myself that I’m cured of the immediate discomfort and was back home to discuss the next day’s work with my son and daughter. But the bully asthma has, later I limply recognized, an old revenge to deliver.
As the black night set it, the relief of normal breathing was short lived, less than an hour, after returning from the hospital I started getting a worrying hunch that a storm of an asthmatic fury is ready to blow up in my lungs. My usual calm is quickly taking over by a nervous frame, mentally skimming the next day’s agenda. My experienced understanding of an asthmatic punch is that it prefers a graveyard shift. I decided instead of midnight knock at the hospital door and inconveniencing the folks at home at that unearthly hour, I prepared myself to shift and get admitted in the hospital hoping all the needed emergency care would be handy there.
After initial medical examinations and formalities, I’m wheeled into one of the, ‘I’m not to be disturbed and wanted to be alone’ room. I told them earlier that I’m not expecting any attendee along with me because my son is busy making arrangements for my wife’s first-year ceremony. My thoughts, after settling on the comfortable hospital bed, the headrest raised and set for my easy breathing; are not able to settle on one question, “what the hell is happening to me NOW, why this sudden breathing havoc, after a long forgotten gap of ten years, and look at the offensiveness of its knock, at this age, with all the emotional baggage I feel I don’t have enough physical and metal will to endure any of this untimely ambush on my withering coping capacity and to tolerate any sort of illness”. I have few answers and more suffering accumulating in my lungs.
I spent the interrupted night with knocks on the door, doctor quietly step in with a matter-of-factly manner conducting the routine prodding over with his stethoscope on my chest, on the stomach, and my back. The attending nurse standing behind him ready to take the commands; during the whole night, I hardly slept with worry hovering in every corner of my mind. I was told I was suffering from a serious rolling of bronchial asthma and thus launched a mini-invasion into my body with antibiotics, bronchodilators, antiallergics, nebulization, antioxidants all pumped into my bloodstream through a cannula plastered to my wrist. Exhausted, drained, devoid of any sprinkle of strength I got discharged the next day noon reached home with the help of a friend. Half-a-day left to prepare for my wife’s function.
Perhaps it has to be too many medicines in too short a time, or sheer overtiredness, lack of proper nourishment, or mentally worn-out. The consequent cacophony of how I’m going to survive the physical reality of the day, the January 17th, my wife’s first memorial day showed its violent shock early in the morning.
It started like this: I sat at the dining table, breakfast placed before me; right away I sensed something wasn’t right at that moment in me. The instant I had one mouthful, it uncoiled like live burning tentacles brushing insides of my mouth entering my food pipe exploding finally in my stomach giving a feeling that some hot liquid gushing inside; suddenly the reaction became agonisingly unbearable, something similar like the hot contents from a vessel is directly poured into my raw fleshy stomach.
The pandemonium that started in the stomach didn’t stop there as it raised its next level of punishment to my body. My immediate surroundings seemed slowly disappearing, it’s foggy now, my eyesight becoming blurred and dropping, my body seemed losing its weight and floating, my hands went limp, words refused to come as an audible sound, the contours of my son and my daughter sitting across the table becoming distant and clouded. Feeling in my body drained away everything went black before my eyes and I collapsed on the dining table face down.
For the next thirty minutes, it was loud chaos around me and I was carried to the nearby hospital, the same hospital where my wife was treated for over six months. The emergency room doctors brought normalcy back to my body and mind and assured that nothing was alarming to me. Perhaps, ‘he may be under too much strain and stress’ one of the duty doctors provided a rejoinder as a compliment before packing me back home after one hour. I personally felt better enough to resume my work to proceed with the ceremony function.
“As soon I enter our school compound I rush towards the completed flower decorated memorial –to pay my reverence to you. With a sense of atonement, I have a reason to believe that I’m not alone now. Restored lovingly in a monument you are closer now as a new sunshine, a new embodiment of your mind, body, and soul. From every frame of the windows along the corridors, of our home, the fine picture of this marbled laid memorial is now filled with all its piousness; surely a restful residence for you”.
“This altar that I built for you today is my serenity. Sublimely in place, as a source, for me to find a new direction to stay strong and move forward. I believe that this sanctified abode of yours would mellow all the scars of pain and loneliness that I have kept deeply hidden that it may appear strange to others. That it would inspire me to position on the road to recovery, unlock the unrevealed bindings that we shared for thirty-four glorious years and reconstruct those meditations in the form of themes I’m compiling every week moderately, word by word. I want the courage, I need to be expectant, from today on I wish no day would be painted gloomy; yes, now you are there within my eyeing view. Every day”.
“Today I’m a happy man after twelve months of inexpressible torment that I’m able to immortalize you in a place where we both have walked along together the academic and social tracks, been our creative best: our school campus. I believe this enshrine would pull me out from the depths of loss and bring to me relief a bit closer and let despair drift afar. I could feel the wired optimism inside me taut and plugged. And I believe my hope and future were becoming self-fulfilling”.