Death

Don't worry, this isn't the start of a sixteen year old's poem with a Big Noun title. It's a simpler question.

Suddenly death seems to loom larger in my life- people around me are growing older, and bad things tend to happen to grown-ups rather often, it seems. There are accidents and cancer and scary diseases that go undetected, and in the last two years, five people I shared different parts of my life with are gone. Relatives, teachers, friends, acquaintances. And there are those that count their lives in the ticking clock of chemotherapy.

And I'm curious, how do you deal with it? Do you hold the ones near you closer, do you feel icy fingers slipping over your own time on the planet? Do you race faster to the end, since you don't know quite when it will be? Do you belittle your own problems in the light of these bigger ones? How do you honor their memory and make them count without losing a little of yourself in this slip-sliding count-up or down or whatever it is you call the march of time?

At a conference this week, I learned it is best to use quotes from sources sparingly when one writes. Use your own voice, said this best-selling writer of sixteen books. In the particular anecdote I'd like to put down today, I am not sure whose voice echoes the strongest.

At sixteen and a half, I doubt it was mine. There were so many- friends who had got into colleges with fancy names, friends who knew precisely what their career path was going to be. Parents who distressed over what I was doing with my life. Teachers who did a double take when I said I was going to study English. I was confused, and angry, and had heard enough of other opinions and words. She called me out from where I lingered at the back of the group, and asked what I was going to do in college. She was the first person who said to me, "But of course you should be a writer."

She told me I was "confident and poised and warm"  - though which sixteen year old ever is? We reconnected fifteen years later. She was no longer teaching at my high school. She had moved, from Bombay to Delhi, and in response to my message said, "Of course I remember you, and I'm so glad you are a writer now." She was, even after all these years, the teacher who could bring out the best in her students with just a few words. Her daughter, a few years older than I, was married with a toddler.

My teacher herself was battling metastatic breast cancer. 21 infected lymph nodes. I know the odds. But still, I wasn't expecting her to be gone in these few short months. Just like that, no responses, and a message from another teacher saying she is no more.

The memory of those exchanges now weighs a little heavier on my days. Without her to share them, I must remember, all on my own, that of course I must be a writer, and I can be confident and poised and warm. And so I try to raise my voice and lift my words to match her graceful spirit.