“The End” by Rabindranath Tagore

My grandma died a little over four and a half years ago; it’s hard to believe it’s been that long. She is, to this day, my role model, undoubtedly one of the sweetest, most loving people I have ever known. And she could read me like a book: I think this is what I miss most. She understood me better than, quite possibly, anyone else. It is to her I’d like to dedicate this post, because I feel that this poem, “The End,” by Rabindranath Tagore, really encapsulates the presence she still has in my life:

The End

It is time for me to go, mother; I am going. When in the paling darkness of the lonely dawn you stretch out your arms for your baby in the bed, I shall say, “Baby is not here!”-mother, I am going.
I shall become a delicate draught of air and caress you and
I shall be ripples in the water when you bathe, and kiss you and kiss you again.
In the gusty night when the rain patters on the leaves you
will hear my whisper in your bed, and my laughter will flash with the lightning through the open window into your room.
If you lie awake, thinking of your baby till late into the
night, I shall sing to you from the stars, “Sleep, mother, sleep.”
On the straying moonbeams I shall steal over your bed, and
lie upon your bosom while you sleep.
I shall become a dream, and through the little opening of your
eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you
wake up and look round startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall
flit out into the darkness.
When, on the great festival of puja, the neighbours’ children
come and play about the house, I shall melt into the music of the flute and throb in your heart all day.
Dear auntie will come with puja-presents and will ask, “Where
is our baby, sister?” Mother, you will tell her softly, “He is in
the pupils of my eyes, he is in my body and in my soul.”

The people in our lives that we lose never really leave us. They have made their impacts on our lives, and nothing can change that. They are forever in our memories, and forever in our hearts. And as this poem states in its opening line, there is a “time” for everyone to go. I like that the narrator is open and accepting of this, in his simple, yet powerful, declaration, “I am going” (1).

It’s also beautiful that in each of the instances described in the poem, the deceased is a kind of savior for his mother: the “laughter” (9) during the lightning, the one who tells her to sleep when she is restless, and so on. He himself eases her mind in the midst of her struggle with his death.

This reminds me of my grandma’s rosary service, at which a poem was handed out, written by an unknown author. One of the lines was, “Perhaps my time seemed all too brief;/Don’t lengthen it now with undue grief” (17-18). The point the poem is making is that, rather than spending our time after a death in misery and grief, we should celebrate the life of the person we lost, and think of them positively when we reminisce. The people that we love wouldn’t want us to be unhappy; they’d want us to continue living as best we could without them.

Coping with death is difficult, but it’s important to remember that our loved ones remain with us no matter what. We can’t be sad that they have departed when they have never truly left us; they are everywhere around us.

And Grandma, I hope you know that you are in my heart all day, everyday.