The Blessing called Parents

For the past 3 years my family and I have been visiting a senior citizens’ home in Singapore. We generally meet the senior citizens for lunch or dinner, serve them food, try to have a dialogue with them, get our kids to mingle with them and eventually make every effort within our capacity, to bring a smile on the faces of at least a few of them. During one of my visits, I met an Indian lady who was probably as old as my Mother. She held onto my hand and kept looking at me with absolutely no specific expression on her face. I tried talking to her and asking her a few questions, but she wasn’t too keen to answer and continued staring at me. After a while, she simply walked away. I always wonder what she must have been thinking while looking at me? Did I remind her of someone? Did my presence refresh her memories of some good or not so good incident in her life? Whatever may be the case, I am certain about one thing, she was definitely fighting an emotional battle internally. A battle that was triggered within her by one of her very own. A battle that she probably did not foresee coming. Her gaze gave me sleepless nights for a number of days thereafter.

When I visited the home earlier this year, I managed to connect with one of the caregivers’ there. I learnt from her that a number of inmates of the home were actually abandoned by their families. On enquiring further, I was given to understand that in most cases, these senior citizens have to be hospitalised due to certain medical conditions and are thereafter left unattended in the hospital by their families (who simply disappear into thin air, after completing the admission formalities).

While I always knew that inmates of a senior citizens’ home were generally abandoned by their families, just listening to how their families orchestrated the process gave me goosebumps. How heart-breaking the experience must have been for those aged people. To realise that their families, who they worked so hard for, who they loved so unconditionally, who they made so many sacrifices for, din’t actually care for them anymore and, as a matter of fact din’t even want to know if they survived their stay in the hospital, must have made them feel horribly lonely and numb. The physical pain caused by their ageing bodies would have gotten nowhere close to the emotional anguish they would have experienced, all thanks to their loved ones. 

As a mother of two kids myself, I often tend to put in a lot of thought in planning the future for my kids. My husband and I often have conversations about how it is so vital for us to set our kids free after a certain age and let them live their dreams in the real world. We always keep reinforcing to each other, the importance of not weighing our children down with our expectations, not holding them responsible for our old age and so on. We talk about how we must sensibly plan our finances so we have enough resources to take care of any contingency as we age, without putting any kind of burden on the shoulders of our kids. We want our kids to enjoy their life without having to constantly worry about us, their parents. 

Am sure most parents tend to think on the same lines, isn’t it? For parents, all that matters is that their children are happy, peaceful and doing well for themselves. They seldom expect anything material in return from them.

However, many of us will agree that life doesn’t always go as per our plans. At a time when you least expect it, life very subtly and suddenly tends to present you with surprises and/or shocks, many of which have the capacity to change the entire world around you. In a matter of a few microseconds, in the blink of an eye, your entire world can come crashing down into a million pieces. So, despite all the meticulous planning for our future, if we do end up being dependent on our children towards the tail end of our lives, isn’t it only natural for us to expect them to be there for us. Shouldn’t children naturally be able to and inclined to, shower their ageing parents with love, warmth and affection, for the simple reason that they love them a lot too.

Now, I genuinely do not intend to provide any advice on how one should treat his/her parents. Honestly, I am not perfect by any yardstick and have my own set of shortcomings. But I guess, after making a number of visits to the senior citizens’ home, I am just finding it very difficult to understand the psychology of those human beings who abandon their old parents (the very same individuals who are responsible for their primary existence). How can one become so cold blooded and detached, that he/she simply doesn’t feel any emotion for those individuals, who always loved them with all they ever had (perhaps, they still do). 

There are a number of people around us who have lost one or both their parents at some point of time in life (sometimes right from the time of their birth). They spend a major part of their childhood and even adulthood longing for the tender loving care and affection of their parents. They try to see glimpses of their parents in members of their extended family or even parents of their friends.  The life long grief and void that such people experience cannot be expressed in words. Indeed, life does feel quiet unfair at this juncture, right? On one hand there are people who yearn for their parents every single moment of their lives, while on the other hand there are some who tend to abandon their parents for reasons only best known to them.

The experiences I have had in life have taught me a number of vital lessons. One of the key lessons being that, no matter the mistakes we make, no matter the number of times we cross the line, no matter the number of times we blatantly disregard them, our parents are always willing to forgive us and continue to love us. They are probably the only people on the face of this earth who will always selflessly wish well for us. If we cannot give them reasons to be happy in this lifetime, at the very least, we must try not to go out of the way to inflict pain upon them. We must treat them the way we expect our children to treat us. We must strive to give love and keep the cycle of love alive around us.