“Some souls leave the world, but never leave the lives they taught to live.”
“You spent your life teaching me how to stand; I never imagined I would have to learn to stand without you.”
Four years, Di.
Four years since I heard you call me Montu.
There are days when I still reach for you in my mind—as naturally as I did when I was a child. You were always there. Teaching me, correcting me, doing my holiday homework with me, protecting me from the world, and somehow knowing what I needed even before I knew it myself.
You didn’t just hold my hand.
You taught me how to hold my own.
You taught me that life needs balance—that you should never give so much of yourself to anything that you disappear inside it. Not in love. Not in work. Not in anything.
“Your life is yours,” you would say. “You know how to live it. Nobody else does.”
I understand those words differently now.
When my marriage began falling apart, you didn’t cry with me. You held me tighter. You made me look up. And when life broke me in ways I never imagined, I found myself searching for the strength you had spent a lifetime putting inside me.
But, I am sorry I couldn’t save you.
I still remember your last rites. Watching you return to the earth. Then walking back into a home that suddenly felt unbearably empty.
Four years later, the emptiness has changed shape, but it has never disappeared.
I see you in Maa’s eyes when she misses you.
In Dada’s silence.
In Burger’s empty arms.
In Guddu’s tattoo of two birds tied together by a red thread—because Mamon called her Birdie.
I see you in the boys when they ask if they can call God’s home to speak to you.
And I see you in myself.
Perhaps that is your greatest gift to us.
You left us no choice but to become stronger.
When I was hurt, I remembered what you had taught me about dignity. When I was afraid, I remembered your hand. When I wanted to give up, I heard your voice telling me to lift my head.
You are still raising us, Di.
Even from somewhere I cannot reach.
Sometimes I wonder why you.
Why someone so gentle had to leave so early.
Maybe this world simply asked too much of a soul as soft as yours. Maybe God decided you had given enough.
I don’t know.
I only know that I miss you.
More than words can hold.
And yet, I don’t want your memory to be only about grief.
So we are trying to live.
We are building again. We are laughing again. We are finding our feet again.
And every time we rise, a little of you rises with us.
I wish you were here to see it.
To see me becoming the woman you always believed I could be.
But perhaps you are seeing it.
Perhaps you are somewhere smiling and saying,
“Finally, Montu. Now you understand.”
Four years without your voice.
But not four years without you.
You are still the light we walk by.
And as long as we live,
you will.