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This cancer survivor who lost her mom shares a key life lesson on grief and joy
Updated On: 23 July, 2023 09:04 AM IST | Mumbai | Nasrin Modak Siddiqi
She lost her mom and survived cancer all in the span of one year. Learning to grieve well is as important a life lesson as finding happiness, says author Pallavi Aiyar
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Pallavi with her mother Gitanjali Aiyer in August 2018. while on a holiday in Kumbalgarh, Rajasthan
On the morning of June 7, the news of her mother’s death shocked her. She had spoken to her barely 12 hours ago, making vacation plans for August to celebrate the end of a year of cancer treatment for award-winning journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar. Her mother, renowned yesteryear Doordarshan English news anchor, Gitanjali Aiyar breathed her last in Delhi. The next few days were a blur. From funerals and last rites to finalising bank procedures, being surrounded by people and bereaving, Pallavi was only responding to what had come to her. A week later, when she was back home in Spain—where she now lives with her husband and two sons—she began to process what had just happened. “There is no easy way to lose a parent,” she tells Sunday mid-day over a phone call. “Whether it’s dementia or watching them wired to hospital tubes or something like this—sudden, without a warning—for me it felt like someone had sucked breath out of me. Nothing made sense. It felt unreal... like some distorted sounds came from far, far away. When I returned home and had this space to go back in time—to when I saw her last,” says Pallavi, who recently blogged about her experience of dealing with loss.
In August 2022, Pallavi was diagnosed with breast cancer. “It hit my mother harder than it had hit me. It’s never quite easy for parents to see their children in pain. She didn’t have any acute problems, just chronic pains but COVID-19 had slowed her down. She wanted to come down before my surgery and I was glad that the kids would have someone at home while I was out of action. She arrived three days before the surgery—in a wheelchair, with a broken ankle from a fall she had three days before her flight. I was irritated because now there would have been two patients but she was my source of strength. I wanted her, quite an irrationality, to kiss and make it all better, which she couldn’t, for even mothers cannot banish cancer. She was also in pain herself, and frail, her stomach acting up, which made me guilty for not being well enough to look after her. Mothers and daughters and our tangle of love and guilt—it never ends,” says Pallavi.
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