Losing Amma, Finding Home. A memoir about love, loss and life’s detours by Uma Girish.

Age is just a number... you are never too old to outgrow the need for your mother. Her tender care, love and above all the warmth in her kitchen make her indispensible. When my mother passed away in 2013, I missed her but thought she had prepared me enough to survive without her. Survive I did, but not a day passed by without me wishing that she was just a phone call away. During that period when I questioned if I had done enough for her, if I had made her proud and if there had been a way to save her; I chanced upon this beautiful heartfelt book “Losing Amma, Finding Home” A memoir about love, loss and life’s detours by Uma Girish.

This soulful book is ‘a heart-rending narrative of losing a parent, living through the pain and transforming it to discover one’s true calling and life’s purpose’. This is the story of Uma, who barely four weeks after arriving and settling down in Chicago with her husband and fourteen year old daughters hears that her 68 year old mother has been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer. Torn between the need to stay back and help her family settle into a new place, new environment & culture and rush back to India to be by her ailing mother; Uma feels helpless. Like any normal individual, Uma’s first reaction on reading about the cancer in her sister’s email is to turn to God! “I pleaded and bargained with God; convinced myself I was going to wake up from a nightmare any minute now. I raged at HIM; apologized, before pleading and bargaining again.”

In this book, Uma talks about coming to terms with the harsh reality of an ailing parent who might only have a few days left. She is forced to suddenly reverse roles and play a parent to her parents’; she is forced to take decisions, she is forced to sit down and take stock. The chapters following her mother’s demise; I identified with so strongly that even now when I read them I tear up. The shock, the denial, the feeling of despair, the emptiness right to the bottom of your gut... I went through all of that.

From the time I could remember, my mother always spoke about how it was important for a lady to die a sumangali (a married women). Uma too talks about it. “In the Hindu tradition, dying before one’s husband is the highest honour a married woman aspires to. To leave her earthy abode, all of herself – mind, body and soul – to the one man she made vows till her last breath. Her greatest reward comes in death.” My Amma too got her wish. She went a sumangali, dressed in her wedding sari, with a huge bindi on her forehead.

The pain and anguish that her father displays is also so touching. “What will I do without you.... how could you leave me here and go away....” is what he says when he sees her. These are scenes we often see in movies; but reading about it after having seen your father go through the same is heartbreaking.

Uma moves on from there to trying to find herself and find a purpose in life. Slowly she limps back to normal. She finds a job at a retirement home, she takes help of a counsellor and she finds hope.

This is a book where each page made me re-live those months following my mother’s demise. I understand that it was not a cure for my melancholy, but it was release. I had not reacted traditionally when my mother passed away. I had not fainted, or fallen on her, or stretched out, or sat in a corner crying my heart out. Don’t get me wrong’ I did cry.. but silent tears that only she would have understood. Reading this book helped me release all those tears. I cried at night, I cried while reading the book, I cried in the bathroom, I carried when no one was looking. In the end I felt lighter, I felt like I was finally ready to let me mother go free, I was ready to release her from the cage I had put her in.

Now when I think of my mother, I remember her laugh and the way her tummy would shake at my silly antics. I remember her sambar and the crispy star appams she used to make for me. I miss her, I do. I miss her when I write posts from the heart and they get appreciated. I miss her when my daughters’ do something funny and I want to tell her, I miss her every time our Bengali sari seller comes visiting. But now every time I miss her, I see her smiling at me from wherever she is, telling me that she is finally peaceful, free and that she will be with me whenever I need her.  

This book is a thorough tear jerker and will make even the stone hearted weep. This is a book from the heart and for the heart. This is a book for those who have lost a dear one and for those who are looking for help coping with the pain. Finally this book is about finding hope.

Uma Girish is a certified dream coach, grief guide, author, speaker and bereavement volunteer (yes there is such a job) in a hospice. She is passionate about helping women find meaning in their loss and awaken to new purposes. She also facilitates a grief group at a retirement community. You can contact Uma at www.umagirish.com

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