I have been MIA from here for far too long. There was a reason for not writing because I was planning to move the blog to a custom domain and inertia took the better of me. I genuinely missed writing here but it became that deadlock situation where I had to move domains first to start posting regularly and I wasn’t taking a start on the move per se.

However, more recently, something happened which I wanted to update in this space. We lost Rahul’s dad on 24th June. He was suffering from Amyloidosis. An incurable disease that may happen in kidney transplant patients. He was diagnosed with it somewhere around Sep’20. He basically got kidney transplant done around 14 years ago and regularly used to visit his doctor from Surat to Bombay every 3-4 months since then. However, ever since the pandemic, he had stopped doing that but he started observing some things about his body which eventually led to the diagnosis. Things only went downhill from there health wise. However, he had a great zeal to live. While all the doctors we consulted had made it clear that there’s no cure, he was adamant to keep going to his Bombay doctor to get whatever best treatment he can get. His doctor finally started Chemo with the intent that it would improve his health to some extent, but after the first session itself, he got extremely weak and struggled very badly. However, he was still pretty certain that it would take him 6 months to get back at his feet (quite literally, as he was unable to walk since past few months). However, he lost consciousness on Monday, 20th June, maybe it was a cardiac arrest, cannot say for sure. He was put on ventilator and gained back consciousness. Rahul and I were back in Delhi at that time but immediately flew back. He was conscious and aware of everything when we met him in the ICU on Monday night upon reaching. He was fully aware until Tuesday. Then, multiple surgeries and cardiac arrests (yes, multiple arrests) ongoing, he started losing consciousness since Wednesday and we lost him Friday morning, 24th June, 2.45 AM.

Rahul and I used to stay outside the ICU at night for those 4 days (his mom and sister used to stay during the day). On Thursday night, Rahul had asked me to put up an alarm of 2.15 AM so that we go inside the ICU to check on Papa. I found this surprising for 2 reasons – 1) Rahul had almost stopped going inside the ICU since Wednesday as he was scared to look at Papa in that condition, 2) i don’t know why he specifically said 2.15 AM. Even before the alarm could ring, doctors came out to call Rahul inside around 2.10 AM. I was asleep at that time, but woke up due to the startling beeps from the ICU. I rushed inside to see Rahul there and the doctors were trying mandatory CPR at that time saying that we are almost sure that we have lost him. The mandatory CPR was done until 2.40 AM or so and that’s when they declared.

Those 4 nights in the hospital were such an experience that I honestly hope to God nobody has to go through. I even thought of blogging it on one of those nights but just didn’t happen. I have never stayed in a hospital for such a critical, life-altering thing and being in the ICU ward just makes it even difficult to decipher.

Also, I wanted to mention – I didn’t make a post about my tauji (father’s brother) whom we lost to COVID during the delta wave. It was a conscious decision because I didn’t feel like it but I realized it would have been good to mention proper closure since I wrote a bit about it here and here . He was an extremely innocent man, the kinds who inherently try to do good for anyone and everyone but he was never very talkative and had become very difficult to talk to ever since he lost his wife (who passed away at 62). We used to have very less one on one conversations but he was a very warm man, his oxygen actually dropped suddenly, got hospitalized and the next day he was no more. Just a day before or so, he had actually called me up to check on me and my mom since we were also suffering from COVID. I am so glad he did.

Even with Rahul’s dad, I didn’t have a huge one on one relationship, and, in fact, just the other day, I was telling my MIL that when she had asked me to try convincing him on something that he was not agreeing to, I so didn’t want to do it because it had led to a huge fight and I didn’t want to get into that with him, since I didn’t have a huge camaraderie. While its okay to occasionally fight with someone whom you talk and share a great bond with, in this case, it just hurts because even at the time of the fight, I had this in my mind that he is so ill and I shouldn’t be pursuing this.

Anyhow, I want to end this post by recalling good things about him. One is that even though he considered taking care of himself the most important thing to him, he loved having people over from all spheres of life and showing them a good time when he was not ill. The other is the fact that he was a man of science and tried to reason everything logically and if a logical need arose for a known one, he tried helping as much as he could.

I hope he rests in peace wherever he is.

I have lost some very close people in these past couple of years and I hope they are all in a better place.

Also, people most attached get the strength to deal with the loss.