Is there a right time for pain?

Amrinder Bajaj

SHE was too young to be widowed.’ A chance remark by someone set me thinking. What was the right age to become a widow? When the woman is in her 40s, with none of her children settled, or when she is in the 60s with her children settled far away from her? Asking her to live with them would cramp their lifestyle, as also hers. 

Though she would prefer to live in her own environment, among people she has known all her life, an elderly woman alone in the Capital is a soft target for thieves and killers. A young widow, especially if unencumbered, has the best chance of starting life afresh. 

I mask the dread of my impending widowhood, not with stoic resignation, but with a flippancy bordering on the facetious. My husband has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and in a poignant reiteration of my marital status, I have taken to wearing a mangal sutra, when usually a solitaire adorned my neck. When a colleague admired it, I said: “Might as well air these (I have four) before it is too late.”  

A doctor-friend recently took us for a ‘mind-body medicine’ meet with the Brahm Kumaris at Mount Abu. I saw her wear white, as the Brahm Kumaris did and asked: “Why didn’t you tell me, I would have…” 

“It does not matter,” she said. Once again, I masked the image of a bleak future with a flippant murmur, “Time enough to wear white for the rest of my life.” Thankfully, she did not catch my words. Virginal white or the white of widowhood — white is an asexual colour.    

Though our marriage was never idyllic, it was a 40-year-old habit and habits are hard to break. My grief, like a red-hot chimta, in the chullah of life, is two-pronged. I suffer at the thought of the sufferings my husband will endure till life eases out of his tortured body, and I dread the thought of a lonely life, stretching endlessly before me, with no one to share a thought, a meal, a bed, a life with. No one to wait up for, go out with or fight with. Yet, I try to be brave in front of my husband and refuse to let my pain squeeze out as tears. Suppressed feelings find an outlet in blasts of unbearable migraines. I wish that a cardiac arrest takes me before him, but quickly quell such selfish thoughts. It would be cruel to forsake him at a time when he needs me the most.