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A Christmas reflection on an extraordinary life

by Neil E. Das

 

I was talking to a friend the other day and told her that I could not remember whether my mother was a sensitive person when it came to figuring out how people might be feeling and ministering to their emotional needs or not. I do know that she certainly quickly came to know what sort of physical needs that people had, and if it was within her power to meet them in a way that would be beneficial to them, she would readily do so, often sacrificially.

That does not have much to do with the picture above, but it was interesting for me to think about, nonetheless, and the impetus for me to borrow the picture from my father and reproduce it first on my blog and now here. I believe this picture was taken at Christmas in 1982 when my brother Virgil, back from college in America, was visiting our family, who lived in Pakistan, where our father is from and where my brothers and I each grew up save for some furloughs to America. We each gave my mother a rosebush for Christmas that year, which is what she really wanted, as you can see in the delight in her face. And, OK, in planting these, my mother did express one of her more unconventional theories. She brought some placentas home from the hospital, where she worked as a nurse and was the principal of the school of nursing, and had our gardener place them next to the roots of bushes as he planted them, American Indian fashion, only they used dead fish with corn. She must have either read that this was a tradition in some places or just thought scientifically that it would work as fertilizer. It is a bit weird to write that out, but it was not nearly as weird as it seems, if you knew my mother. “If you knew my mother,” now there is a phrase that could bear a book’s worth of unpacking. The verb is in past tense because on August 3rd, 1986, when I was a very young 16 years of age, my mother, Norma Lee (Bodenbach) Das, died in an accident at our home in Pakistan.

Talking to my Aunt Carolyn, my mom's sister-in-law, at Thanksgiving this year, I noted that it is hard to talk to people about a relative who was rather extraordinary, because they will be like, “Yeah, right, she was your mother.” Yet, nonetheless, she was extraordinary. In the 1950s, she took a Pakistani man home to meet her Southern Illinois relatives, became engaged to him, and, in spite of at least one bout of cold feet, packed all her worldly goods and wedding bower into metal barrels of the kind that they used to use to ship goods to places like the Antarctic, crossed two oceans in a boat, and within three weeks of arriving was married. Within the next twenty-four years she was able to accomplish some remarkable things, including extensively practicing all types of nursing and training hundreds of Pakistani nurses. And, in many ways, though she was an American, she became the lynchpin of my father’s family, deeply loving and being loved by all.  

Her life testified to the understanding that all people were important. She worked countless hours at the hospital, but sill managed to teach me through third grade and my brothers through fifth and seventh grades at home, to provide a quality English education for us. She walked to work, an unthinkable action for even middle class people in Pakistan. Her route took her through often squalid streets, sodden with backed up rain water, and past the walls of houses patterned with drying buffalo chips, the fuel of the indigent. And when she saw need or a woman who would greet her, she would stop and talk, often bringing much needed medicines back later, to the effusive thanks of those who received them.

After she died, she received an award from the Pakistani government, presented to my father by the President of Pakistan, for her service to the country in delivering over a thousand babies, or something like that. At any rate, she delivered a lot of babies, and sometimes when the babies were unwanted, she tried to hook up couples who wanted babies with babies who needed parents. Sometimes when she was assisting in the OR and when a patient’s relatives were not being cooperative she would step out to give her own blood. Having type O positive blood, she was nearly a universal donor, a metaphor captured in platelets and cells which never is lost upon me.

Pakistani mourning, though wonderfully communal and free, with people flooding the grieving family’s home for days to openly wail and commiserate, can also sometimes become rather dramatic and showy at times. In the mourning for my mother, though, I do not believe any false affectation was required. The house was full for a week, with hundreds of people coming to sit anywhere they could find room and weep, many with stories of her kindness. She would fairly often pay a patient’s bills on her own if they could not, completely unbeknownst to my father. In one story that was particularly a bit of a wonder, an anonymous but persistent mourner made a point trying to speak to my father, even cutting across social classes and norms to do so. When asked why she was making such a scene, she held up a child, stating rather dramatically that she had my mother’s blood in her veins; that that the child was there only because of her gift. Later at her funeral, according to newspaper reports, some 3,000 people came.*

I could go on with more dramatic stories of her alarming charity, with numbers of examples of the people whom she touched, but two small incidents are more meaningful to me by far. About a week after she died, we were in the back room of our house with the window open. In the back yard our elderly cook squatted, while working a sickle in the lush, tall grass, putting it into a huge cloth bundle on the back of his bicycle to take home to his water buffalo. He came into the bedroom where my family was and sat with us for the first time since after Mom had died and wept and wept and wept. Sobs racked the frame of the small Punjabi man with a turban, who used to share a hookah with my nanny, who would travel with us to the mountains in the summer for several months. He wept for his Midwestern, German American, mem-sahib who spoke such a funny mixture of Urdu and Punjabi and who worked with him as he cooked things such as stew and roast potatoes and cauliflower with hollandaise sauce, along with the curries at which he was so proficient. In time, he would not need her guidance with the western dishes, but she never would fail to help when another hand was needed in the kitchen.

In another incident several weeks after the funeral, in another quiet room in the back of the house—those are the quietest, loneliest sort of rooms—my brother Virgil who was then in medical school was found weeping as perhaps he had not done until that point. I do not remember much about that conversation, except for the phrase, “But, she was my mother,” burbled out in response, I believe, to the press of people who also so keenly felt the loss themselves or sought almost to canonize her as a modern day saint. No matter what she meant to so many others, it was certainly not selfishness to acknowledge that, though he might indeed be proud of who she was, he missed her for reasons far more intimate, for the ache of having a piece of his very own self ripped away. When a loved one dies, infinite small details that pixelate lives shared together are simply be erased, like when one color, a main and vibrant one, is completely edited out of a picture. Alternately, the conversation of living that you have with a loved one is simply over, and there will be nothing that will exactly fill that silence.

A vivid color, the words of a conversation, I could go on with the metaphors in an attempt to grasp what my mother meant to our family, nest, lap, glue. Growing up in two separate cultures, in two very different families, the influences of East and West flowed into my mind as naturally as the tides and sought to mix into some common level. It was Mom, really, who made of these disparate parts a consistent whole. She worked creatively to maintain the American side of our heritage, giving Christmas and other holidays their traditional American flavor, while at the same time celebrating them with vigor in their Pakistani settings as well. Christmas meant stockings and stories and Christmas dinner and singing carols around the glow of the Advent wreath as we contemplated the meaning of the season. Christmas also meant going to a plethora of dramas at local institutions; greeting the local carolers with traditional oranges and peanuts; watching the midnight procession to the church with its camels—real camels—and candlelight; going to church the next morning, burgeoning with a perennial influx of members; then going home to have dinner with our extended family, with spicy curry and meatballs and rice. The differences were less like the two sides of a coin, than the separate threads of a tapestry, woven together into a whole, mainly because of the influence of Mom.

I have only recently begun to come to a realization, strengthened even with the writing of this essay, that there is currently a significant disconnect between the two parts of me. The influences of my Pakistani heritage are largely buried deep within a carefully guarded, even rather carefully crafted, though no less organically derived for all of that, understanding and expression of myself as a Midwesterner, occupying a place in mostly white, small town and small city culture. One of the thousands of questions whose answers are simply nonexistent and not helpful to conjure up is how I might have factored the equation of my identity if my mother were alive. As Aslan, C.S. Lewis’ glorious depiction of Christ in leonine form, is wont to say, we are never told “what might have happened.” I am not sure how the presence of my mother would have helped with that integration, but I do believe that the divide would not have become as stark.

More than cross-cultural dynamics, though, I would have loved to have talked to her as one adult to another about so many things. I would love to have some understanding of the topography of her internal landscape, whether she pondered similar questions to the ones I do. Did she think about her acts of charity and kindness, either before or after she did them? Or did they simply grow out who she was without much reflection? Did she struggle with pride? What did she think about God? About theology? What would she tell me about relationships? About love?  Did she have epiphanies on her journey from growing up as a conservative Baptist to finally becoming an official missionary for the Presbyterian Church USA only months before she died? What was it that was appealing to her that one Christmas Eve on furlough when she took us boys off to a Lutheran service on a cold winter’s evening?
I believe that when you lose someone key moments can become iconic, touchstones imbued with even more meaning than perhaps they should bear, yet I cherish several conversations with Mom because in them I knew some of the dynamics of her adult mind. In one, when I was fourteen or so, somewhere along Highway 67 in the middle of rural, western Illinois on the way to deputation at a church, it was just my mother and me in our 1976 yellow-green Ford Maverick. She had just learned to drive a few years earlier in her late forties. Deputation was that traveling road show that career missionaries were compelled to perform to raise support, a show which ironically seemed to call for humility amidst a retelling of one’s accomplishments, and which worked best when spiced with cross-cultural anecdotes and colored by fancy dress and displays, to become like a sort of animated missionary prayer letter. Mom was a great one for color and anecdotes, but not so much for the self-aggrandizement. She pretty much was straightforward, and the nature of her work as a nurse and nurse educator and her person itself did the talking.

On the drive through the furrowed fields and trees which I still love so much, she was telling me about her quiet times, about how she had been reading about King David and how God would not allow him to build the temple because he had been a warrior and shed so much blood. Reading the pertinent passages since, I think she was more or less right. She went on to detail the see-saw pattern of wicked kings and righteous kings in the history of Israel. More than the content of what she said though was simply listening to her talk to me almost as a peer. In another incident, when I was younger, while walking to work with her in Pakistan, she told me about the novel The Midwich Cuckoos. In that instance she might have shown a bit more discretion as I remember that the story rather creeped me out a bit, but how I would love to pick apart a book with her now, especially a science fiction novel like that.

In this holiday blitz of movies, one of the movies, P.S., I Love You, is about a deceased husband who sends letters to his wife after he has died to help her emerge from grief, to reengage with life and love. I could not get myself beyond the girlfriend bonding moments in the trailer—high jinks in a boat in Ireland, singing karaoke, checking the sexual preference of male prospects—to get myself into the theater. Yet, nonetheless, the theme of seeing what it means to hear from someone who is gone is certainly an appealing one, even if such contacts are expressly forbidden in Scripture…a great chasm has been fixed. This potentiality is even more affecting when children are the ones left bereft. In the movies, Ponette and Millions, respectively, a beautiful little French girl who fills the screen with her expressive, sad eyes and a generous, little boy who is wont to see visions of the saints of the church, both are only really able to move on with life after visitations from their mothers. I do not resent these deus ex machina moments as you might suppose, neither for their implausibility nor impermissibility, though they can create a bit of an ache at times. I see them as symbols of the realizations which must happen before the reconstruction of life into a meaningful whole can even begin to occur. These touching moments in these movies lie to us only in as much as all symbols lie, in telescoping, crystallizing, epiphanizing realizations and processes that, in truth, take a lifetime to be completed, but they are no less true for such condensation.

At times having felt very much like the little children in those movies, I plan to continue my own processes of reintegration, perhaps even with renewed intensity, to keep re-coloring the parts of the picture that have been left colorless. Indeed, I plan to try to even make the picture more detailed by talking more to those who did know my mother as an adult, to my brothers, to my aunts and my remaining uncle in America, to my other relatives here and, yes, in a long overdue trip to Pakistan one day, and finally to the man behind the camera for the picture above, to my father. As he approaches his eightieth birthday this March, with twenty-one years passed since the woman who made his life a whole even more than she did mine left, as the bitterness of that loss for finally begins to be tasted less than the sweetness of good memories, I believe that the conversations we might now have with one another have ever greater potential for revelation and balm.

Finally, getting back to the photo that began this long ramble, a little note on our attire. I do not think that the stain on my brother Adrian's oh-so-sexily-opened shirt is a stain from the meatball curry we invariably would have eaten that day, curry of the same type I will eat as leftovers from Christmas dinner as soon as I finish this article, but rather is a flaw in the photograph. I would dearly like to show this picture to his congregation over in Illinois someday. Stud pastor. Oh, and my shirt, with the poufy sleeves and long collar? I loved that shirt. I bet I could get some money for that shirt at the local hipster boutique. Or maybe not. My Mom’s trippy dress might be a winner, though.