Questa è Enida

This is Mom a few hours before she went into the operation theatre at HUKM the night of July 31. She was wearing a hat Edrick made at school celebrating Grandparents’ Day coincidentally on the same day. Mom was extremely weak and in the same time was in so much pain I thought she would break. She didn’t break. My heart did.

I made jokes just before she was wheeled into the OT. That I was going to miss her tremendously since I would not see her until August. She was going to be in the OT from July 31 to August 1. It was a flip of the calendar leaf before I saw Mom again, I said. She smiled. But even that smile broke my heart.

After the high-risk surgery, she was placed in the Intensive Care Unit for the next six days. And for those six days, she was declared ‘very critical’. I didn’t know what that meant. But it broke my heart all the same when Mom just would not open her eyes to our calling for her.

It was on the fifth day of Mom in the ICU that another news broke my heart clean. Between Mom’s falling into that probable long sleep and my falling out of myself, the love of my life was falling out of love with me. For once, I wished it was I who was lying on that bed…falling out of life.

I never did fall out of life. Neither did I…love.

“All these things shall love do unto you
that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.”
~ Kahlil Gibran