What Amy’s Death Taught Me.

This is a true story but I have changed the names to preserve the privacy of individuals.

I clicked on the school email that morning hoping that this would have a story about my son’s classroom. He was only 6 years old at the time. It was about my son’s classroom but not exactly about what I had expected. It informed friends and family friends of Amy that she had to be suddenly shifted to the hospital. She had lost her vision and was likely to have suffered irreversible brain damage. The email also requested donations so that mum and dad could spend most of their time with Amy.

Amy used to suffer from a rare genetic disorder. I don’t remember the name of the medical condition. As a mother, I could feel Amy’s family’s pain. How do you explain to a child why she cannot see anything? At that moment, I prayed to Shri Hari knowing that the doctors had already said that there was almost no hope of recovery. But, Mother Nature always likes to surprise us. A couple of days later, I got a message in my inbox because I had donated money that Amy had got back her vision and was back at school. Even the doctors were surprised at this miracle. I felt immense joy. I was sure that all mums and dads who had read the school’s initial email must have prayed for Amy. Mother Nature always responds to genuine requests.

That afternoon I asked my son about Amy. He said that he had always seen Amy in a wheelchair. I forgot about the whole incident within a few weeks. And then, there was another email from the school around three months later. Amy had suffered from a bad attack of her medical condition and had passed away. Why did Amy have to go? I thought that Mother Nature had responded to our pleas. 

At Amy’s funeral, I noticed that her family had accepted that Amy had suffered enough and that it was time for her to go. This made me hypothesize that our body has to be fit-for-purpose to be able to hold the soul within. Mother Nature did respond to the multiple pleas that were coming from all the parents but Amy’s body was perhaps no longer fit to contain the soul. I don’t know whether my interpretation is correct or not but it makes me less restless when I think about Amy. And, although I have read about this a hundred times in our religious scriptures, Amy’s death also highlighted the transitory nature of our body and the permanence of the soul. Indirectly, this event has also motivated me to think about my own spiritual journey.