Aleyamma lived.

In memoriam of Aleyamma, my grandmother.

The other night, Aleyamma appeared to convey a very important message: ‘I don’t like how you have begun to refer to me as Thankamma or Aleyamma since my death. How audacious! I am your grandmother. Please stick to the courteous Ammachi when talking about me’.

I smirked in response.

This is my first act of defiance against Aleyamma, calling her by the name. However, I must clarify that it is not out of irreverence or a juvenile desire for rebellion that I choose to address my grandmother by her maiden name. All my life, I was afraid to speak back to her. I do not think death has equalled us, but it has depersonalised her for me, and I find it easier to summon her by the name.

Aleyamma was born in ___________. I frankly do not know, because one might as well consult her tombstone for such encyclopedic details. Aleyamma reigned in my life for a good twenty-five years, so she could have been anywhere between the age of twenty-five to fifty.

Aleyamma died at the age of seventy-eight. She was quite unwilling to die and powered through life out of some congenital intransigence. Last year, the doctors who treated her broken hip pronounced her life span to be six months from the date of the hip replacement surgery. She lived for a full eight months. The additional two months which she grabbed from the hands of death proved tortuous for those around her, primarily me.

Aleyamma was very bad at dying.

She was supposed to die in 2002. She was supposed to die in 2006, 2020, 2022, 2024… I lived in a state of perpetual fear of Aleyamma’s seemingly imminent demise. You see, she was awful at dying. She was so bad, and her own words testify to this fact:

‘They had come to take me with them. I told them I am not prepared at this time. And then, they left’

So, she snatched a few days from the arms of death, prepared herself (rather, unenthusiastically), and after two days of being in the precipice between the state of life and death, she died, without much fanfare.

In her final days, she merely breathed. A soft breathing of inhales and exhales, which was so delicately woven by the angel before her. It was a symphony, and the angel was the conductor who drew the rhythm of her breath with his baton. The final note could barely be heard, for the music was soaked in by the atmosphere, and the audience (again, just me) was lulled to sleep.