A lonely struggle

She wished her husband a tearful goodbye after waging a grim  battle for the past 15 years .He was a young  man, a successful engineer in his early forties ,she a young beautiful woman in her late thirties. Their only son was in school  when tragedy struck the happy family. A case of medical treatment gone horribly wrong or was it a case of a hopeless undiagnosed ailment  that turned  the man into  a vegetable. He was being treated at a leading clinic in Kolkata . The family had little knowledge of what went wrong with the treatment . He left the hospital and came home in an ambulance . He had lost his speech and movement completely.  The woman braced herself for a dismal future. The son was packed off to his aunt’s house and couple of attendants were brought in from a local agency to help the lady at their ancestral house where she had moved in with her husband. Thereafter the son never stayed with his parents. Caring for the invalid father  was a painful and stressful job .  The little boy’s aunt did not want him to live and grow up in a sad ,depressed environment. The mother relented ,she knew she was facing an uphill task –mentally ,physically, financially . Her only comfort was that her son was  in the same city and she could see him whenever she wished to.

 The day they took her husband’s lifeless body away she had murmured “ My companion has left me” .She had felt a sense of deep relief but completely empty and drained inside.  She was a housewife and did not have any life outside . The tragedy  had destroyed two lives at one stroke. The stress had taken a toll on her looks and health. Her son was now an engineer living in Bangalore. He had a life of his own.

Life is not always beautiful .Life can be for some people extremely lonely and stressful .How does one cope with the suffering of one’s beloved  and one’s own . When your beloved suffers life can become doubly painful. Yet when the man got his  final  deliverance the woman was distraught  inspite of having wished so mentally thousands of times. What did the young couple do to deserve such a harsh punishment in life? Why did the son have to grow up without the strong, comforting, loving presence  of his father? Do we blame our doctors or the couple’s destiny?