Hemashri’s poignant reflection, exclusively for Different Truths, explores a daughter’s admiration and helplessness as she witnesses her ailing mother’s strength through years of suffering.
Who can be like my mother?
Who can flow like a river?
I watch silently as my ailing mother lies on her bed.
Love her to the moon; she is the one
who showed me this earth
Yet I never longed to be like water, which takes
The contour of the vessel
So, I never longed to be like you, my dear mother!
Don’t know what I could become,
Maybe I just longed to be this, i.e., me.
Only after crossing the fifth decade of my life,
I realised even if I had wished, could I be like you,
My dear, loving mom?
Would I have been able to endure the trauma
of this twenty-two-year-long battle with sickness?
Do I possess that endurance, patience
To bear it all, my dear mother?
A woman is expected to endure everything in silence...
Once, a police officer from Bihar,
who used to tell me tales of Tihar, had said
"This soil, the cow and the mothers
shall have to bear everything"
Oh, really?
I just thought, does a degree and an official chair
Guarantee refinement of education.
I can never possess your kind of patience, for I have not
given birth like you to have delivered three babies,
enduring the pain of a normal procedure.
It was you who insisted that I had chosen
to opt for the doctor's knife to be a mother
Helplessly, I am a modern woman averse to pain!
How do you endure these countless injections, sonography, MRI,
urine or blood tests, and from where you draw
Such courage, my dear mother?
None can say how many thousand times
You have endured the pricks of those needles...!
The father of modern medicine owes you an apology,
But then it is my sheer fantasy!
Do you remember those surgeries?
Oh, my dear mother!
My tears got completely dried up
in the process, and I now do not cry at all.
Or maybe seeing these procedures; I don’t know exactly
when I became a robot!
I know how annoyed you must be to go through all this.
But then we can only give you medications again
for that, i.e., antidepressants or sedatives!
We have been helpless, mute spectators for
This painful voyage of yours, my dear mother!
I just wish we could enact an Act to award
Severe punishment to doctors who treat patients wrongly,
Though it cannot give you any relief;
May medicine be the noble profession of
The chosen angelic souls,And not just another lucrative career!
Still, on some days, I just feel like forgetting who I am
Or where I am, and shout at the top of my voice to say
Let not any mother suffer what
My mother had to endure for years
The devastating consequences of a wrong diagnosis,
Wrong treatment of a simple
Curable disease, my dear mother!
What can I do for you? I know not how
I can bring some relief to you....
Today, I feel tired and helpless...
Oh, my mother!
Who can be like a mother?
Who can flow like a river...
Notes:
My 76-year-old beautiful mother has been suffering from a series of health issues for twenty-two years due to the initial three years of wrong diagnosis. It has been a traumatising experience for the entire family. She has been operated on multiple times, including two major surgeries.
She lost her husband, our father, two months ago. For nearly two decades, he nursed her with great patience.
She can seek redressal for medical negligence by filing a case under the Consumer Protection Act, 1986.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
Hemashri Hazarika is an Officer of the Assam Civil Service since 1997. Her research on Assam Civil Service brought reforms in 2015. A first-class Postgraduate in Economics from Gauhati University, she was awarded JRF/NET by UGC in 1997. Her experience as a bureaucrat has sensitised her to human sufferings. A solutionist by passion, she takes an active interest in issues related to Governance, Development, Women, Children, etc. Reading, Writing, Speaking and Painting are her hobbies.
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