Skip to main content

Keeping Quiet

Reading this in the news some time ago reminded me of my friend N. A regular person but she has had life experience similar to royalty in this case. N too has three kids and her spouse was diagnosed with cancer. She made the choice not to discuss the situation with anyone and also not share the diagnosis with the younger kids because they would not know how to process it. Their father was said to be working from home because he needed some time to recover from an unspecified illness - nothing to worry about. The kids were satisfied with the explanation and life went on. He had made it five years since the time of his first chemo. N still does not talk about his situation with anyone. Those who know her know that the topic is off-limits. All three kids are doing fine. Their lives are as normal as it could possibly be. 

When at first N refused to even acknowledge what was going on, I will admit I was concerned for her mental health and reached out to be someone who could just listen if she wanted to say something. I would not take the conversation anywhere that made her uncomfortable. She firmly declined the offer. It took me some to time to understand that a person does not suddenly turn incompetent or mentally unstable in crisis - least of all someone like N. She is a formidable woman and has accomplished near impossible things in her life. It was people like me who though well-meaning were not able to maintain perspective when we heard the bad news impacting our friend. We were the ones that needed to back off and let her do what she judged was the best for her family. It turns out that only regular people can have such the luxury of such choice. When a person is so much in the public eye they lose their right to the very basic protections afforded to people in such times.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more