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.

Comments

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...

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...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...