The courage I inherited from my timid mother!

As the world celebrated their mothers, I was running away from the timeline. With really tight deadlines and loneliness of this place, with the wifey also not around, I did not want to start missing my mom all over again. I'm a coward. 

Well, my mother was one as well. Coward would not be the right word I should say. Timidity would be a better word. She was afraid of everything. Every damn thing. Like crossing the road, her children's future, a difficult patient, talking in English. She was afraid of it all. 

At least that is what I thought of her; Till that dreaded disease gripped her and like a boa constrictor broke her piece by piece.

A timid person and cancer should not go along well together. When the doctors initially gave her four weeks to live, she should have just withered away. She was timid after all. 

Yet she did not. She smiled through most of it. Oh ya, she went back to work. And took the stairs for all the four floors of our house like she used to do before she started medication, with that unbearable pain. The steel in her suddenly grew bigger. Maybe it was always there and I had missed seeing it.  Where did that come from, I had often wondered. Every day when she got up she vomited. Of course, she cried. Then braced herself for another day's work. And worked her way through, till the last bone was broken. 

Was she really timid? Maybe I mistook the innocent smile for timidity. Yes, maybe she feared for everything in the world. But faced them all with the smile intact. Fear never came in between her and the most difficult patient. Neither did fear come in between speaking in impeccable English to her foreign son as she often said of the boy 'J' from the US, who stayed with us for more than a year. And bigger than it all, it never came in between letting her children live the lives they wanted in the remotest of villages of tribal Assam, considered to be terrorist hit by the world around her, even if that meant quitting high profile corporate jobs. 

And then I realized, courage is not an absence of fear but facing your fears with a smile. And then I realized, my mother was the most courageous woman of all. For she had the biggest fear and yet the best smile through it all. 

I smiled my way through the mother's day. For my mother's gift of courage to me is woven subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin.