Life and Death Between and Beyond the Blogs

My first blog in 2015 was somewhat self-aggrandizingly titled "Time." It was about my visit to a watch repair shop in the neighborhood that made me all philosophical. And my last blog in 2015 was titled, "The Answer is 42!"--self-laudatory once again, as I was describing the beautiful things in my mid-life that I am grateful for, including my 82-year old father's "successful" angioplasty after he suffered a cardiac infraction. Life was near-perfect between the first and the last blogs of 2015. Until it wasn't. Two days after I wrote my last blog on November 23, 2015, my father suffered a second infraction. The angioplasty turned out to be not that successful after all. I rushed to India on the Thanksgiving Day to see my father. I got to spend nine precious days with him at his bedside, thinking he is on his way to a slow recovery. Then his aging, battle-torn heart stopped beating forever---he didn't survive the third infraction. My optimism was silenced, and how!

My father's demise taught me one vital lesson. I can blog to my heart's content, but life and death happen on their own terms beyond what I can control through my wishful blogging. No matter how fancifully I title my blogs, time doesn't care to stop for me or my loved ones. This feeling of powerlessness is painfully and poignantly real. But strangely enough, I also cannot think of any other way to catharsis. So here I am--trying to get over the pain caused by the loss of a parent by blogging about the act of blogging itself! Talk about meta!

I brag, I breathe, I bleed and I break down through my blogs. Celebrated novelist Haruki Murakami once wrote, "Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives, we nurture death." My blogs nurture me as I nurture my eventual inevitable death. But until death comes, I plan on living my life every day--a life shaped partly by shiny memories of my parents, but mostly by the thriving hopes for the long list of things to come before I join my parents in their journey to eternity. Here's a slightly belated toast to living life in the new year 2016!