Last time I visited my parents, which was today, one year back, I had written up this about my mom…
“The biggest fear I have in life? For all the attention I have paid to my dad, what have I done for my mom? It is so easy to take the role of the caregiver for granted. I try to even bring up the topic of “what if mom dies before dad?” and I am summarily dismissed by everybody. My dad’s response is simply “I will die the next day”… continued here…

Who knew life will play out exactly as I had feared?

Six years back on this day, I had managed to get my dad to visit his birthplace that he had left at the age of two and a half (when he lost his dad). There was a poignant moment when he sat down and tried to remember the day he saw them carrying his dad’s body down the road from his house. You can read the whole story here.

In any case I had ended the story with the following lines…
“And then it hit me again like a ton of bricks. This will be far more personal to me some day. There will be the long road for him too. And I will have no ability to hold back my emotions. I know that for sure, because I can feel that lump in my throat even as I write this story out…”

Re-reading it today, I suddenly realized that I had never prepared myself for my mom to go first. The last roads in your life can throw some unthinkable twists…