My friend, Jaykumar, wrote this after my sisters remembrance in 2002. I would like to share. September 14, 2002, Poughkeepsie, New York He was a mountain of grief, was Ashwin’s father at Sneha’s memorial service. He looked like a brigadier general standing at full attention, massive barrel chest drawn up, fully inflated, holding his breath—or more precisely, his breath locked into him, in a long term sort of way. There was a certain air of power about him, with his grand, bushy mustache, and a square face with cheeks like he had a half peach inside each of them, looking altogether like a young marlon brando playing a young godfather in part 2. He had tears in his eyes, and what was making him stand so straight and so pulled and at attention was not anything volitional at all, but all the love he had in the world, the giant amount of love he had for his daughter—it was filling him up, not just his eyes with tears but his body with air, it was locked up in him and animating him and when you saw him, though I had never seen him before, you knew, you just knew, that this was the father of the departed girl. And if and when he let go of his breath you knew he was going to burst into tears, in the literal way of what bursting into tears really meant. And in sneha’s wedding video, which we saw later that day, he was also a mountain, the exact same mountain, but this time filled with pride not sorrow. He was also pulled up into himself, also standing at attention, also about to burst, though this time with pride. Simply amazing how similar the poses were—a mountain of a man, trembling with emotion, and with love for his daughter. Aswhin’s eulogy—ah, what a terrible word, to have to use non-metaphorically—was heartfelt, and so open, so terrifying. He had been through something so moving that he had great courage, so baring himself to us was not even a big thing. It had been a while since I had seen him—there was no goatee, no mustache, just Ashwin’s face, open and plain. Sneha, born just thirteen months after him, was not just my sister, he sobbed, “she was more like my twin.” “All my memories are of her!” he cried, and I sobbed too, as did all around me. Though she was younger, he called her by an honorific—“chechi”, meaning older sister. And it was not a mistake, but a sign of his respect for her, even as a tyke. Sneha seemed to be a person of deep emotional wisdom. That I learned from the speech of Ron, her husband, a spiritual and powerful guy, a musician and a doctor, long hair, and goatee, looking a little like Johnny Depp as Don Juan De Marco, who speaks a bit in that california hippie way, in a hyper simple and hyper humble way that reveals his strength and comfort in himself, unlike many of the young indian american boasters I know, dropping the names of people and institutions four to a sentence, scoring points off of one another, talking as slickly as possible. Ron just read sneha’s letters. And what letters they were. Full of deep ruminations of love and loss, gentle admonitions to people who see deeply, and understand that simple recipes don’t work. Ron sent the signal--this was not to be a rote ceremony, but one that really had the stamp of the individuality of the departed. “If I could say just one thing about sneha,” ashwin said, and here I winced—it seems that all eulogizers feel forced by some sort of grade school taught english composition convention to try to sum up the departed’s entire life in a word or two or three—an impossible task that inevitably ends of being trite—“was that she lived.” Ahh. The man pulled it off. I liked it. She lived. What other saying could sum up a life? She lived every day, Ashwin said, and damn it from what I (J) saw of the pictures flashing up on the screen and from the letters from her hand read by Ron, she really did—a person of passion, who was emotionally insightful, who saw life very clearly—that there was the terrible and the beautiful, and because of the former there was the latter. Asked Ashwin--If you could live thirty two years, or a thousand years under a rock, which would be better? If everyone in this room did not wake up tomorrow with just a little better idea of what it means to live, I would be deeply disappointed, he rumbled. Amen. For me, I feel it. I feel different. It is important to know that we are alive. And Ashwin pulled no punches—I know this is not pc, he said, but those officials, who were lionized post 9/11, they did nothing to help us. We do not have a shred of information about what happened to Sneha! And he ripped those who had brought down the towers, the evildoers. And then Kevin, youngest brother, rolled up to the lectern in the morning in his blond streaked hair and moon face, wearing sunglasses, the very picture of cool, in his wry and young gravelly voice. Sneha helped me to be myself, to find myself, and to trust in that.....She was a beautiful person not just physically, but spiritually....Sneha is vaaast, he says in his new york accent, she is immense, she fills this entire room, she’s all around us... And cleverly, and beautifully, he says, and Sneha is proud of us. It’s been a difficult year, and we’ve made it, and we’re here. She’s proud of Dad, who held things together, and is closer to us than he ever was...She’s proud of Mom, from where Sneha gets that beautiful spark. Sneha only saw the best in you, that secret talent that you had, that wonderful quality, and even more important, she could show it to you. She could take it out, turn it around, and show it to you, so that you could see it too. And the two priests—one marthomite, one episcopalian, gave their personalized memories. The marthomite, of how he had helped them get married, and how he had dealt with his own mothers death—and officiated there, and how he had done hundreds of funerals—this was a man, I thought with answers, and I thought of the buddha, to the woman who had lost her son, who took her around the village, and said show me the house that has not suffered loss. He said that we have memories, and no one can take those from us. And the other priest gave what he recognized as a “challenging teaching.” He talked of Judaism, of the wordless cry at its heart, that is the cry of the mother over her lost son, but that lost son happened to have been an enemy, and a killer. And that cry , at the very core of judaism, recognizes the humanity of all, of all, including our enemies. And so he said we must mourn not just for the 2,801 who the new york times says died in the towers, but for 2,810—including the ten highjackers. A challenging teaching, I know, he said. And coming at it from another angle, said the priest, in a very famous conversation two thousand five hundred years ago , x and socrates were talking about what it takes to live a good life. X advocated the pursuit of power and pleasure, and socrates spoke for doing good. And x said but how can you question me, when you see evil dictators and others doing wrong, and enjoying themselves so much? And socrates said in doing wrong, they are hurting themselves more than others. To use a modern example, the priest said, the mugger who attacks and stabs you has hurt himself more than you. And this thing with the towers, how could it happen? As bishop tutu said, how could god let this come to pass? And his answer was, so that he could suffer here with us. It is all lovingkindness, the priest said, using a buddhist term without footnoting it as such. The number of dead was not 2811, but 2812, for He died there too. And then the eulogies and sermons were done. And then, after that hyperspecific and hyperpersonalized emotional catharsis, after hours of individualized eulogies and rememberences, came impersonal tradition: For a good long time we sang psalms, stood up, sat down, prayed, kneeled, ate wafers or wathched them being eaten, smelled incense, shook hands with our stranger-neigbhors in the pews, and flat out Worshipped in the most traditional of ways. It was long and hard and boring, and worth it. The massive and thankfully anesthetizing and comforting weight of tradition, of enforced ritual, of absence of choice, to balance it all out. The absence of choice, of anything explicitly personal was good. Though impersonal, it was not random or disconnected from the event--all the words tied in, for this was the liturgy of death. Physically, physiologically, it felt good and right. And then the perfect Act III of this rememberance hit yet another psychological bullseye—after Act I, the intense personal eulogies, and after Act II, the grand formal ceremonies, was Act III, a simple, low key, and long term hanging out—the receipt of common comfort. A feast at the church, and then all day and all night hangout at the Philips spread, in outer Poughkeepsie, just past the Shagbark development. Hundreds of people, loafing the whole day. Everywhere you turned in the sprawling crib was another nook of people, relaxing, enjoying each other’s company, and being thanfkfully lighthearted. It was interesting to be in. The lightheartedness was great, because it was OK, because it was Permissible, because it was Sanctioned, by virtue of the hard penance of the morning, and it felt very right, very soft, very human, very gentle. Another gift from Sneha, who I never met, till now.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 20:09:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015