Without My Pretty Lotus in my arms, I feel emptiness in my heart and soul. I find myself searching the crowds for her smiling face—I know it is impossibility, but how can I help myself.
My tears have become God’s gift to me like the holy water. They have helped heal me as they flow.
I cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over my head, but I have succeeded stopping them nesting in my hair.
For as long as the world spins, the earth is green with new wood and the ocean is blue with water, she will lie in my arms and not in the coffin box.
It took a minute to find My Pretty Lotus, hours to appreciate her tender loving care, and days to love her, but it is taking my entire lifetime to forget her.
The songs that my beloved used to sweetly sing have not ended because the melodies keep lingering on to make my life appreciate her music.
Losing my precious treasure affected me greatly. She is now buried inside me and became a big part of my soul by causing a deep hole in my heart. I would not let her go away, even when my heart stops mourning.
The weirdest thing about my devastating loss is that my life actually goes on. When I was faced with that tragedy, my loss seemed so huge that I had no idea how I could live through it, somehow, the world kept turning, the seconds kept ticking and my life kept moving with the memories of my beloved.
Like Helen Keller, I am not the bereaved alone. I belong to the largest company in the entire world—the company of those who have known sadness, sorrow, loneliness and suffering. The feeling to belong to this company makes me live and love My Pretty Lotus still.
When My Pretty Lotus, who I loved so dearly, became a memory, that fond memory has now become my greatest and loving treasury.
Death of my beloved was not the last sleep because it has become the final awakening for me to treasure all her truth, beauty and goodness.
The sudden end of the life of my beloved, which was endless, was as a snowflake that dissolved in the pure air that I keep breathing to live my life.
I go on living, knowing that I will never again—not ever, ever—see My Pretty Lotus who I loved so much. How do I survive a single hour, a single minute and a single second of that knowledge? How do I hold myself together? I have gathered all her fond memories to make my life worth living.
Perhaps they are the twinkling stars and all the openings in Heaven from where the love of my lost one peeps through and shines down upon me to let me cure my grief and keep me happy. This is my strength to live on without feeling the loss.
After the sad passing away of my precious treasure, my tears were my own wisdom. They come out to make me feel relaxed enough to let go and to work through my sorrow. They were the natural bleeding of all my emotional wounds that helped me carry the poison out of heart. These tears helped me to ride on the road to recovery.
When I too have departed from this world, someday my people are going to look back on this moment of my life as such a sweet time of grieving. They will see that I was in mourning and my heart was broken, but my life was changing all because of the multiple fond and worthy memories of the perfect family life My Pretty Lotus had given me. To give it all without the wish of receiving anything back was her way of life. We realized this after she was gone, what a shame!
I now know that love is stronger than death even though it cannot stop death from happening and no matter how hard death tries, it cannot separate us from loving each other. It cannot take away my fond memories of My Pretty Lotus either. In the end I feel that my life is stronger than the death of my beloved all because I treasure her love and all her tender loving care for me over half a century.
My grief has been like a ball of string, I start at one end and wind. Then the ball slips through my fingers and rolls across the floor. Some of my work is undone but not all. I pick it up and start over again, but I never have to begin again at the end of the string. The ball never completely unwinds. Thus I have made some progress to leave behind my grief and move on with my life.
After the sad passing away of my beloved, everyone kept telling me that time would heal all my wounds, but no one could clearly tell me what I was supposed to do right then. I could not sleep properly or eat well. I kept hearing her sweet voice and sensed her permanent presence even though I knew she was not there. All I seemed to do was to grieve and cry. I read and knew all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still did not know what to do with all that hurt, sadness, sorrow and loneliness I had. I began living with all her sweet memories and began creating poems to find an outlet to all my in-built emotions. These poems were my acts and processes of healing.
I have lost my beloved and I definitely found it hard to live without her, and my heart was badly broken. The bad news was that I never completely got over the loss of my Pretty Lotus. However, I also saw some good news. This made me believe that she would live forever in my broken heart and that no one could steal her from me. So I managed to come through. It felt like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but I learnt to dance with the limp. How long would I be able to do this I do not know?
When my beloved wife passed away I knew she was not coming back, but I still kept thinking that she would. Nothing could make that positive feeling go away. I had figured out what death meant when I lost my grandparents and parents but I am still living my life in some kind of weird denial about it when my wife is no more.
I knew for certain from our scriptures that we never lost the people we loved, even to death. They continue to participate in every act, thought and decision we make. Their love leaves an indelible imprint in our memories. We find comfort in knowing that our lives have been enriched by having shared their love. My beloved wife has gone but I have all her memories with me to treasure for the rest of my life.
My scriptures told me that a part of you dies when a special Loved One passes away but after I lost my beloved wife I tend to disagree with this because I believe that a part of me lives with my Loved One on the other side.
I was lying on our bed that horrible Tuesday morning when my beloved had gone to the bathroom without my usual assistance when suddenly an SOS came, ‘Darling save me I am falling!’ Although I rushed and got her to the bed and gave her all the first aid I could and called the ambulance, I still feel terribly sad that I could not save her from that last fall. As Mark Twain said, ‘It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.’
I now know that no one could have survived that fall. Not even a supernatural being. Not even my Pretty Lotus, My Angel. She lay there, unmoving, and I a helpless being could not wrap my head and hand around her to save her. She was gone and I was left alone.
I now feel I have lost every part of me and there is nothing left but the parts she had given to me. I now need to hold those pieces together and keep living for her. Staring out to the wide sky and the deep sea, I have finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still actually here somewhere. She is present in my memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, loving and living.
She is now a shovelful of ashes already scattered in the river as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality. How can this be acceptable to me when she was once my beautifully complex Angel that is now dwindled, gone to Heaven and left nothing behind except these and many other similar poetic creations spread and penned in ink on thousands of blank sheet of paper in book forms?
So I believed that our life is defined by time and we should appreciate the beauty of time. Take the time to plant and harvest love. Take the time to laugh, enjoy or cry as moments dictate. There is always time to be happy, time to be sad, time to be born and time to die. I lost her who was the whole reason for everything in my life so I see my left-over time of this life to mourn her passing until the day I die.
I now hear her say, “Please don't worry about me. My suffering is over and I am resting in peace in Heaven.” In the wise words of Dylan Thomas, ‘after the first death, there is no other’ and in the words of the Vedas ‘the twice born has reached the absolute knowledge.’ That is where I now live.
Finally as I have witnessed and felt the passing away of My Pretty Lotus, My World, My Life and My Beloved Wife, it makes me become more conscious that life indeed has an end but the multiple fond and worthy memories live on forever.
The fond memories are all that I have of My
Pretty Lotus and these help me survive the
storms and struggles of my daily life after
she passed away.
Ram Lakhan Prasad of 76 Saroj Niwas,
Bellbowrie, Queensland. 4070.