One night after almost 10 subsequent nights since his brain stroke, I asked Dad which hymn he would like me to sing for him. It was our little night-time routine in the general ward of this top-notch city hospital. He would spend most days and nights in silence, having lost most of his cognitive function. Occasionally, there were words, as if some memories tore open the walls that his stroke built. 

“What shall I sing today Dad?”

“Last stanza”

“Last stanza? Of what Dad?”

“How great thou art”

I mechanically googled the song since I didn’t remember the last stanza at all. I began singing without realizing what words waited for me in those lyrics. 

“When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation 

And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart” 

I choked. But, in that moment I found him staring at me in such expectation, I began to sing again immediately. 

“Then I shall bow, in humble adoration.

And then proclaim, my God, how great thou art”

Within minutes Dad slipped into a deep slumber, and I kept sobbing beside his bed quietly. At that moment, I knew: 

He was ready to go home to his heavenly father. 

I begged God to save his life anyway. I wasn’t ready, not yet, to let him go. 

One Year Has Gone By

It has been exactly 12 months since Dad passed. We have shockingly survived. 

There have been meltdowns, and lonely days and nights, that unending feeling of incompleteness like I am missing a part of my body somewhere that I don’t know. 

Birthdays and anniversaries have passed without him. Joint family dinners have gone quietly with a clear realisation that a seat on the table is now missing. There were picnics where out of the blue I could almost hear him giggle at one of our silly banters, his deep beautiful voice echoing in my heart, the sound of his walking stick still ringing in my ears. 

I have gone to cafes and places and have almost called his number to tell him how great it was, driving home with the heavy realisation that he won’t be there waiting for me anymore. 

Then there’s the torture of ‘what could have been’. Abhishek and I have replayed countless scenarios where ‘we could have done better’. What went wrong at what point exactly? Which possibilities could have prevented it? How did we not see it coming? Where did we fail? What could we have done differently? The conundrum never leaves us and we keep falling back to the same cycle again and again. 

We have relived every day before 9.30 am of July 30th 2025, rerunning the activities, the decisions, the hits and misses that finally led up to that moment of his last breath. 

Two days before his passing, both Abhishek and I had begun to sleep better for the first time in months. After two months of medical nightmares, we felt the sunlight had finally made its way into our lives. We took him to a cardiologist and he assured us that Dad’s heart was doing well. He was also speaking in full sentences, eating better (No riles tubes for the last 18 days). In the last 20 days of his life, we had handled numerous emergency situations at home where we created a hospice-like environment with a male nurse at his service for 12 hours a day. That gave us confidence, perhaps a bit too much. I used to sleep on the floor just beside his bed. We would wake up once during the night to change his sleeping position (the best cure to avoid bed sores). Even the one deep rash in his body had begun to show signs of healing. 

For a family that had seen the man of their house coming out of the ventilator twice, it was a legitimate hope – that he will regain his strength, speech, and other cognitive functions. But most importantly, we trusted the Lord Almighty. Why would God save Dad’s life thrice in eight months?  

But did Dad want that life? Numerous times we were told that he was a fighter, that he was strong. How many people survive the ventilator afterall? Yet, my thoughts kept going back to the night Dad asked me to sing the last lines of “How Great Thou Art?” Also, way back before his heart attack, he had confided in me, “Everyone comes and tells me how strong I am. But Pinky, I don’t know if I am that strong. I don’t want to be.” I assured him instantly that he didn’t need to worry about anybody’s expectations but just share what he felt. 

So this is what he did. In the months after his heart surgery, I saw Dad break down – sometimes in pain, other times in his utter helplessness. His failing body had begun to break his mind. He was never afraid to be vulnerable before but this was his most vulnerable self. There were days he would share his pain with us and then there were days, he would keep it to himself. Yet, his will to continue to fight was unshakeable, so was his faith in Jesus Christ. 

What stuns me even today is how during his last days, Dad was prepared for both – life and death. I still sometimes lay awake thinking about it. A man can be prepared to die or to live, not both. But my father, my hero, was different from the rest. He was ready to live if God granted it. He was ready to die, if that’s what God willed. He was not only not afraid of death, but he was equally unafraid of living a life. 

The Birthday Verse Miracle

A family tradition that Dad had begun was the birthday Bible verse. He would gift each one of us a specific Bible verse every year on our birthdays. I would typically be excited to get it every year, and spend the day pondering over it. I also had a habit of writing those verses down, sometimes without mentioning Dad’s name on it. This small negligence of not writing down his name alongside the verse cost me dearly on my first birthday without Dad. 

That entire week I found myself frantically searching my old diaries and journals to find the birthday verses Dad gave me over the years but from the years 2022-2024, there was none that I noted down. I was so angry at myself, I also couldn’t find my older journals. 

I finally got tired and gave up. But just two days before my birthday, an ODB passage led me to Psalm 118. There it was! Verse 6 was marked: September 28, 2023 Dad. I had marked it that year in my Bible. Thank God. It said:

“The Lord is on my side, I will not fear. What can man do to me?”

The timing of this verse couldn’t have been better both in 2023 and in 2025. On September 28th 2023, I was on my bed with a cast on my left foot. I was awaiting a fracture surgery of my ankle at the time. For someone who had avoided hospital all her life, this was a daunting prospect. Dad knew that very well and he wanted to assure me that the Lord was indeed on my side. 

On the same day in 2025, it was like Dad was reminding me again that I needed to trust in God’s promise of protection. Ofcourse, I still spent half of that night sobbing, I had peace that God allowed me one of Dad’s birthday verses even in his absence. 

The Lilies That Kept His Presence Alive 

For the first few days of his passing, I continued to feel his presence all around the house. Someone had brought lilies for us and I kept them in a vase for several days. Somehow I came to associate the fragrance of the lilies with Dad’s physical presence in our lives. So I kept stocking them up the whole first month. 

This is how we have learnt to cope with our grief – by keeping his memories alive as long as we can. We consciously talk about him on every special occasion. We fondly remember his peculiar ways often and deliberately dwell on those moments. His daddy jokes, his amazing voice, and just him being him. 

Many people kept telling us, as part of their consolation, that we would eventually learn to forget him. And that thought always made me angry. We had no intention of forgetting him. He was our father, our hero, our champion, our friend. The fact that we feel so strongly for him is the evidence of our love and his love for us.  

I loved this line from Wanda Vision- 

For what is grief if not love persevering?

The Eternal Hope

There are days when the yearning I feel for him – that strong desire to just kiss his forehead, hug him tight or listen to his voice – seems unbearable, I call on God. I urge God to send my father some of my messages. I love you Dad. I miss you Dad. I am sorry Dad for what I said. 

I wonder how I would bear this grief if I didn’t have that one eternal hope. What if I didn’t know for sure that Dad has gone to be with his creator, that he is in the actual presence of Jesus Christ. The grief would have become intolerable and my heart would have burst with sorrow.

The Bible says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” (Psalm 116:15). 

So we live on, without our hero. We live in this hope that one day we will see our father again.