Life will go on, no matter what.
My mother marveled at the depth of grief her four daughters experienced, and the extent to which we missed and remembered our father when he passed. She wondered if we would feel the same way when her time would come. ‘You will remember me for a while and then get busy in your lives, and soon you’ll forget all about me. Life will simply go on.”
We never expected our parents to die when they did. My Mom followed my Dad after four years, when we all caught the dreaded virus. For months on end we avoided meeting each other, but it was January 2021, and it was her 81st birthday, and we simply had to be together to celebrate. So we gathered, bringing gifts, for a delicious tea party with Mummy’s favorite food…..chaat. Eldest Sis baked a cake for her in the shape of a sewing machine, to honour her lifelong devotion to stitching all our clothes. It was wonderful to be in each other’s presence after so long, though I was a bit doubtful about the funny cough I suddenly developed while driving to the birthday get-together.
One by one, we all fell sick, including Mummy, who suffered the most. Oh, how she suffered. A month later, after caring for her diligently at home, Eldest Sis felt the worst to be over, that Mom was on her way to recovery, and she began to plan delicious, nourishing meals she would make for her. She made her soft scrambled eggs for breakfast early one morning, and felt so happy to see her finally eat something peacefully. Little did she know that was to be my mother’s last meal.
It was a devastating, disorienting time for us all, though there was a greater sense of acceptance than when my father died. His death felt too sudden, our minds and hearts refused to take it in. Even my mother, while in her period of seclusion, would sometimes muse out loud at the idea of him being simply….gone? How could that be. He was so…here, always.
I remember I was on the rooftop, tending to my tomato plants in the soft morning sunshine, when Huz came to tell me. My brother-in-law wrote the message on our extended family group, announcing our mother’s passing. It felt unreal, like it couldn’t be happening, and yet it was. That was my mother, the deceased. How could this be? She was so…here, always. I sat holding my mother’s beautiful hands for a long time, those creative hands, her familiar fingers, always busy with something, finally lifeless. I wanted to imprint the feel of her hands in mine.
The strangest thing that happened was how little I cried then. I felt as if I had a howl trapped inside my chest, my sobs were dry. Grief felt like a huge wave that refused to come crashing down. I looked at my sisters and I saw my mother in each one of them. I looked in the mirror, and I saw her in me. It was as if her spirit flew into us all and there was no separation. We were all one.
It is the 1st of June., 2025. Since the last two weeks, I have been coming to terms with a very different sort of death, one that I felt I should write about since it affects me so much. But the story that spilled out is of an older grief. I was watching a video about the loss of animal family members, and what I heard was, ‘when we grieve, we don’t experience one loss, we experience them all.’
This is an obituary for Mowgli, my dear beloved soul-cat. My companion for the last eight years. She was plonked into my life a week before my father died, and I couldn’t help feeling that these two events were somehow linked. My father had often lectured me about my propensity to rescue kittens and keep them in my house forever, his logic being the more time I spend with cats, the less time I’d spend with him. “You’ll regret not visiting us more often one day!”
When I spotted this tiny creature huddled along the side of a road in June 2017, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out of the car to go pick it up. The poor kitten was a dreadful sight…skin and bones, sweating from every pore under a hot sun, dehydrated, one eye bulging out of its socket, mouth open in a silent scream. I often think that at that moment, it was as if the me that was I had moved aside and Spirit took over. I didn’t think …I just knew that if I didn’t stop she’d be dead very soon. It was the month of Ramadan, I was in the midst of a spiritual crisis, but turning a blind eye was not an option. So Amu and I took her home and proceeded to shower her with love and care and protection. In retrospect, my own healing lay in her healing.
We named her Mowgli, I don’t know why the name just fit. Her bulging, infected eye healed and went back into its socket, but stayed hazy and unseeing. It was a magical eye, and Mowgli was a magical cat, a beautifully spotted calico. Not a fur-baby, a person. She was crazy, playful, curious, feisty, intelligent. She got herself into so much trouble so often. We had to rescue her so many more times from all sorts of dangers. The years went by with these three cats of mine, Fuzzy, Minnie and Mowgli, wreaking havoc on our hearts, our nerves and our furniture.
I don’t feel like talking about what happened to her before she died. I don’t even want to talk about the way she died, or all the trauma she had to go through during her treatment. Amu wrote about the whole saga so poignantly on her substack, beautifully embedded with photographs from her life. It’s too painful for me to regurgitate, so I’ll let her be in peace. It goes without saying, we loved her too much, and couldn’t accept her death, it feels like too soon. She was woven into the very fabric of this home. All was well with the world as long as Mowgli was in it. I wanted many more years of her curling up like a loaf on my lap, or perched on my hip. Many more years of seeing her beautiful body, basking in the sun. I can picture her now, happily rolling around in the dust on the courtyard floor.
It’s been two weeks, and the intensity of the ache has softened. I cried nonstop for three days, and on the fourth I finally smiled at the memories, the photos, the videos. After the initial shock wore off, there was the void. Grief for an animal companion is usually of the disenfranchised kind, meaning it isn’t ‘openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned’. But my sisters offered so much support, so much empathy, such concern for our loss. They knew what this cat meant to us. They had been witnesses to her short life. And my fellow cat-loving neighbour dropped by yesterday with a box of cake and a big hug. She knew too.
I see Mowgli everywhere, and I long to see her again. I don’t want her to be gone. The house doesn’t feel so familiar anymore. I’m trying to find solace in Minnie and Billoo….but neither of them is Mowgli. And life….what can I say. It is full of endings.
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