After arriving home in January 2002, we spent some time at home with the family. My grandfather and grandmother had come to visit. In the last years, since my time in cave, they had spent much time with us in Vrindavan. They had a house in another town, about 500 kilometers from Vrindavan, but as my mother was their only child, they enjoyed spending a major part of their time with us.
After some family time we left Vrindavan again to do program in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, in Central India in the beginning of February. It was a traditional program of nine days with two lectures about the scriptures per day. Yashendu was going to do the morning lecture while I was going to give the evening lecture. We had our team of musicians with us and altogether arrived in Indore.
On the second day of the program there, Purnendu phoned us from Vrindavan. He told us that our grandfather had got seriously ill and they had had to admit him to hospital. He said he could leave his body at any time, his situation was very critical. It would be better we came back home as soon as in any way possible.
When we got this news, we immediately started looking for the quickest possibility to go back home. There were no flights or fast trains in the next few hours and so we decided that the quickest way would be to take a taxi. We cancelled the program, said sorry to our organizers, who of course understood the emergency, and started by car to Vrindavan.
On the way Purnendu kept on calling in intervals to update us. We kept on praying for our grandfather to stay alive until we had at least seen him once more.
We finally arrived in Vrindavan and of course went straight to the hospital. Our grandfather was unconscious when we came there, but alive. I spoke to the doctors and they said, he was old and would go soon. He did not have any illness, it was just his age. They told that he could leave in the next few hours or in the next few days, one could not tell.
We went back to the Ashram after some time to see the rest of the family and to sleep after the journey. We had been very much in a hurry to get back to see him but he was not in a hurry to leave the world at all. For the next few days it became a routine to go to the hospital for several hours a day and to sit by his side, so whenever he woke up from unconsciousness there would be someone of the family with him. He did wake up from time to time, smiled and looked at us and we had the feeling he recognized who we were. We were able to say goodbye.
We informed his brothers and they came and joined us in the next days. After six days he then left his body, on the 13th February 2002, surrounded by his family.
He had been a great person. He had lived his life with his principles, an honest life. With my mother being a single child, me and my siblings were his only grandchildren. I, the first one, had been very close to him since my birth. In the eighties he retired from his job and after that he and his wife came to visit us in Vrindavan quite often.
I dedicated my first own earnings to him. After the first program that I did on my own, without my father accompanying me, I came back home. I had earned 500 Rupees and gave them to him in a sign of love and respect.
Whenever it was possible in the years after that he accompanied me when I went to give programs. I anyway travelled with my group of ten or fifteen people and he simply joined us. He enjoyed listening to my lectures and I was proud to have him in the audience.
When I went into the cave, I shaved my hair and he joined me with this action, too, shaving his hair off. While I did not shave in my three years and 108 days in the cave, he did not either and when I came out, he had long hair and a long beard, just like I did.
When he left Vrindavan to go home to his town, I often accompanied him to the train station to see him off and I remember that I cried many times on such occasions, asking him to come back soon. This time however, when he left the world without a promise of coming back, my eyes were dry and there were no tears. The whole family was crying and although he had been the person closest to me whom I saw ever die, I could not cry.
There had been other people’s deaths in which I had also not been among those who cried. I could cry when my grandfather went to come back. Now, with the knowledge that he would not be back, I could not cry but only accept it. He had lived his life and had had a painless death. I was sad but I had accepted the truth of death in my life.
We organized the funeral and many relatives and friends came to take part. As a religious family, we had many ceremonies and rituals for the funeral and for the next 13 days that followed the funeral. We performed them all with much love for his soul.
Related posts
कृपया ग्लानि न करें यदि किसी की कल्पना करके आपका खड़ा अथवा गीली हो जाए
Bitte haben Sie kein schlechtes Gewissen, wenn Sie eine Erektion bekommen oder nass werden, weil Sie sich jemanden vorstellen
Please don’t feel guilty if you get erection or wet by imagining someone
Meine Beziehung zu meinem Vater
My relationship with my father
पिता के साथ मेरा सम्बन्ध
Neues Kapitel im Leben, Herausforderungen und Lektionen
New chapter in life, challenges and lessons
Thank you for telling us about this very personal experience. I have also felt something similar when elderly friends or relatives died. They were expected to die, they themselves were prepared to die, they knew that they would not be there and they had finished their business on this world. So why would I cry for them? Many of them have told me that they are looking forward to see their partners, parents and other friends again who have left before them. I found this comforting, even if I doubt that they will ‘meet’ as if they were still all alive. The souls will feel a bit different without our bodies I guess. But the idea was that they would not be sad, so why would we be?
Death hurts, it makes us sad, we cry, we shout, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. And then after a while the pain fades away and we are able to activate our beautiful memories that we have. But maybe there is a lesson behind that: we have to learn to let things and people go.