By Akanksha Raja

My head is an expansive museum – high-ceilinged, mirror-walled. Everything moves too slowly in there: memory, feeling, all of it. Other people's lives seem to change by the week: what was felt intensely days ago quickly becomes a prehistoric anecdote, buried beneath the immediate concerns of the present. I, on the other hand, carry this awful, sticky archive of everything that happened years ago – the how, why, what, when, and who. I hoard old feelings, states of being, preserve them like relics lying uncatalogued on the floor, weathered from endless rumination. I hold each piece up to one mirror, then another, searching for meaning, but it only consumes me further. I'm the grumpy old custodian, seated in a corner of the archive of my own design. Parts of my soul are frozen in memories I can't let go of.            

Take my mother's pillbox, for example. I bought it for her a couple of weeks after her diagnosis in February – four little containers per day: morning, noon, night, backup – each day colour-coded, starting with Sunday at the top. For three months, every Saturday, I'd take the pills out of their bottles or strips and place them in the boxes. It's been more than five months since her final hospitalisation, and all the pills from Thursday to Saturday still sit there, untouched. I snap the boxes open and closed, open and closed, for no reason. The pills clatter softly. By the time Amma had to go, they were useless, but I can't bring myself to throw them away. Do I expect her to somehow come back, continue taking them, keep up the futile routine we'd established, to, what, get better? Be alive again?            

In all the recurring dreams I have of her, I fully acknowledge she's dead. I'm always sitting in a hospital ward, holding the death certificate, the bills, the reports, knowing she's gone. But in front of me, the doctors and nurses continue to bustle around her – my mother, still lucid, still breathing, still hooked up to an oxygen supply and other vague interventions. She talks to me in the slightly delirious state she was in a few days before it happened. I don't understand what's happening and nobody's telling me, she complains, the same way she did in reality. You're dead, I tell her, but you're not dead dead, yet. They're doing some…things…to make sure you die properly. In the correct way, in a way that makes sense. In one of these dreams, Amma gets out of the bed and dances across the room before curtsying into a collapse and vanishing. Yes, that's it, says a doctor.            

The bracelet is another example.            

So delicate, and fragile, and so easy to slip off. It is made of steel plated in what used to be rose gold, that millennial fad, but most of the pink has faded, like so many things. My sister's and my initials A and P are engraved with hearts on the inner curve. We had bought it as a birthday gift for Amma several years ago, and I almost forgot it was still around. She had worn it often, but rarely in her last few months. A corner of the bracelet reads The Mindful Company. Apt words, considering her life and death. On the outside, a deeper engraving –

BREATHE.

An imperative, a scoff, a dare, a threat, almost satirical in this context. In moments like this, my agnosticism skews towards the possibility of a god with the keenest sense of humour. I let out an inadvertent laugh, which cuts through the pallid air of fresh loss that hangs around the house. Breathing carried her through life, and, quietly, deftly, left her.

It isn't a particularly significant piece of jewellery in the way a wedding ring or a storied family heirloom may be. It isn't a this belonged to my grandmother and her mother before her, and now it is yours, to keep safe for your children after you. I doubt this trinket will outlive me. Right now, though, five months since she died, I'm beginning to worry that I'm quickly forgetting the memories we shared: her laugh, the way I could hear her struggling to steady her breath in moments of extreme anger or sadness. So I return to this little band over and over again as an embodiment of memories of her life and death, and what she has left us with.

It forms an incomplete circle, with one side left open, with no clasp or closure: the fragility of life and love. Squeeze it too tight and it digs into your skin, carceral, entrapping. Widen it too loose and it might just slip away imperceptibly. Let it hold you, lightly. Encircled by the call to breathe, reverberating sometimes like a gentle consolation, other times like an urgent command, still other times like an echo of her voice.

I was eight years old when my mother taught me to breathe. We were in a room in our old house with a handful of adults, all sitting cross-legged on cushioned mats on the floor. We were learning to meditate. My eyes struggled to stay closed, the air felt heavy in the quiet, and this was all very overwhelming, like a complicated secret only grown-ups understood. But it starts with a simple instruction: bring your attention to the area in front of your nose. Feel the air moving in and out. Do not assess its properties – its weight, its pace. Gently be aware of its reality. Most of all, notice that it passes. The air that was there moments ago is no longer. So it is with everything else in the world.     

Those guiding words have stayed with me for decades, sunken deep into muscle memory, even when I didn't understand them, and even more so in the long years of adolescent turmoil when they simply didn't help.

Some years after my first meditation session, I was lying in bed with a pounding in my chest. I had come up to bed after another 10-minute session of meditation but it felt different this time. I was 10 or 11, and I could handle my growing body taking on unfamiliar dimensions, but not the chaos in my mind. Somewhere amid the developing neural synapses, the connection between the mechanics of breathing and the Buddhist notion of impermanence had properly sunken in, and it was a lot to take in. I did not have words for it, the muchness of the world, the muchness of my mind. I had the sense that the world was exponentially bigger than anything I could imagine and that underneath it all ran an unseen energy, not a being, but some mystical force. I imagined the ceilings and the wall and the bed I was on, breathing too, in their own secret mysterious way, and I'd imagine them one day withering away to dust. To contemplate the world and a unified mass of particles is overwhelming. I tried to breathe again, to feel the air moving under my nostrils to come back to the body.

These episodes of overpowering disconnection returned to me with greater intensity throughout my teenage life. I found out they aligned with symptoms of dissociation and anxiety. I'd read about them in a few of Amma's many psychology books around the house. I came to her with one of the textbooks in hand.

Do you know about dissociation and depersonalisation? I asked. Like, there's a few minutes where nothing feels real and I feel detached from my own body.

Try to meditate, it'll calm you down.

I know, I tried. It doesn't work. I was sitting with my friends in the canteen having lunch. And I was talking, and suddenly in the middle of the conversation I stopped. Everything felt far away. And I went to the bathroom and tried to breathe and I felt really scared and my hands were shaking. And I came back and we continued talking and they were still shaking.

She turned to face me. You don't have anything. You're very intelligent and just really stressed. You need to try to sleep better. I know junior college is torture. Everyone goes through it, it's normal.

Okay, I said, and left. Some of what she said was right: I wasn't sleeping well at all. I had the sense that there was a lot more that wasn't right, but I didn't know what to do about it. There was always something more important to focus on anyway. 

My mother, meanwhile, had published academic papers on the effects of mindfulness meditation on adolescent behaviour. The results generally showed a distinct improvement in temperament and in academic progress. Not so with me, or at least not entirely so. I got away with being written off as pleasant and quiet in school, but inhaling all the oxygen in the world couldn't bring my mind to apply itself to any kind of schoolwork that wasn't literature or art. That's where I found my mindfulness. I couldn't draw, couldn't hold a note, but the right combination of colours or the right progression of chords could make me feel closer to the essence of life than anything else. I spent most of my time slipping away undetected into my inner world, and when my inner world got too chaotic I paced my pulse to the rhythm of a poem and felt myself sinking slowly back into my body.  

There's a picture of my mother in college, acting in a play. She looks a little like me. My mother was not a dancer nor a professional performer, but she'd considered herself an artist in the last two decades of her life. She returned to performance two years before she died, after completing an acting workshop for older adults. One of her classmates had approached her to perform in a play they had written, to be staged as part of a public showcase of shorts. The play told the story of a daughter struggling to come to terms with the loss of her mother to lung disease (my mother herself would be diagnosed two years later. Ha.), whom she is unable to visit when the mother departs. My mother played both the mother and the daughter's counsellor: simultaneously the woman who passes, and the woman who guides her child through her own passing.  

Two days before my mother's death, a music therapist visited her. I didn't know what to expect. As much as I believed in the soothing powers of music, I wasn't very convinced that listening to a live performance at this stage was going to make much of a difference. Amma was already beginning to drift in and out of consciousness, uncertain of where she was. In her mind, she was alternately in our living room, at a random electronics retail store, or at Changi Airport. Would listening to music add concert hall into the mix?

In any case, I looked forward to a break from the incessant and grating beeps and whirrs of the medical machinery around the six-bed ward.

The music therapist, Stephanie, walked in with her guitar and gentle ebullience. After exchanging introductions, she moved closer to Amma's bedside.

Can you tell me if there's any song that you really like?

I quickly sifted through mental discographies of music she used to love: ABBA, The Carpenters, Boney M? I wondered if there were any Hindi or Tamil film songs that a young Chinese Singaporean musician might be familiar with. But my mother had already made her decision.

I like The Sound of Music, she replied, softly but with enthusiasm. It was true; that was her favourite movie, one of the first she'd ever watched in a cinema as a child. A small smile bloomed on her face, at the memory.

Any song in particular? Stephanie hoisted her guitar on the bedside rail.

Amma took a while to consider, the titles slipping from her grasp. I quickly butted in with How about 'Edelweiss'?

I still don't know what possessed me to choose Captain von Trapp's sombre waltz, with its melancholic lilt that would further deepen the solemnity of the situation. I realised weeks later while planning the memorial playlist that the most fitting song for my mother was the sprightly and upbeat 'Maria', a perfect reflection of her capricious inner child. She is gentle, she is wild, she's a riddle, she's a child. Amma would often burst into that tune at random moments at home. She could recite the lyrics by heart, complete with different voices for the different nuns, emphatic hand flourishes, and dramatic pauses at all the right places (Maria…makes me…laugh!)

Stephanie opened the sheet music for 'Edelweiss' on her phone. Okay, Mrs Radhi, we're going to breathe with the music now. On the count of three, we're going to inhale with the first line, and then exhale with the next. Follow my guitar okay?

She began to strum. The sound reverberated from the body of the guitar, through the bedrail, to Amma's body, rising with her inhale. Her head swayed gently; her eyes closed; her lips mouthed the lyrics in quivering whispers. She was smiling, really smiling, carried away so softly by the sound. The beeps and whirrs kept up their tiresome drone, but the music lifted the three of us, in our little corner of the room, into an ethereal secret dimension, away from it all. For once, Amma knew with certainty where she was. Not intellectually, not physically, not in the ward, nor even at Changi Airport. She was in the music.

Stephanie's eyes darted between Amma's face and the vitals monitor, as if conducting an orchestra. I couldn't see the stats. I couldn't see much of anything through the sting of hot tears. My body was shaking; the music crashed against me in waves. I tried to follow Stephanie's cue, to let the rhythm guide my own breath: In-hale-d-el-wei-ss, exhal-e-del-wei-ss. I shielded my eyes, hugging an arm around myself, overwhelmed by the life that I saw thrumming through my mother. The effort, the desire, the unfettered joy with which she strained to use her breath and voice to inhabit the music. People talk about music as a balm, as therapy, but what I saw in that moment wasn't so much relaxation or escape but an essential lifeline.  

Through art, her presence fills the room in which I am now writing. In my immediate view I meet the eyes of a beagle sitting serenely in the centre of one of her earliest (and few) attempts at oil painting – some time in her twenties. Another painting of whirling dervishes, inspired by a trip to Turkey a decade ago. Around the room, intricate macrame plant holders, mandalas in paint and ink and quilling. I joked darkly to a friend that if she had been less interesting, less creative, then I wouldn't miss her so much. The status bar on my mother's still-extant WhatsApp profile reads Art is the highest form of self-expression. The sub-header on her LinkedIn profile reads An artist and a meditator.

She wasn't always like this. My teenage self wouldn't have recognised the woman she became, this vivacious artist surrounded by paints, brushes, and macramé, always excited to find a new avenue of expression. In my youth, she was a little more Captain von Trapp than Maria. Not disdaining, exactly, but mildly dismissing any of my proclivities that seemed too artistic or frivolous. I was never a diligent student; my grades were mediocre at best, especially in subjects that bored me – Maths, Science. At 12, after my primary school exams, I broke down to my parents, telling them I wanted to attend art school. To do what? Learn drawing? Sing? she rebuked, her tone more incredulous than cruel. You spend too much time on your drama projects! You need to focus more time on your Maths and Physics.

Years later, when I narrowly avoided repeating a year before university, we sat on her bed, results slips scattered on the sheets like a deck of bad cards. I desperately wanted to drop out of school. A family friend suggested taking a university foundation course overseas, but that was beyond my family's means at the time. I said I know some theatre companies that have internships I could apply for. Or I could do a diploma in mass communications. I remember Amma's heavy sigh, almost as if she were letting go of a dream she'd had for me that I'd carelessly shattered. You have the best resources at your disposal, she lamented. Your father and I both have Masters degrees. I have a Ph.D. We bought you so many books. Educational toys, games. We let you choose your arts subjects because you said you knew what you wanted to do. What are you doing now? Her head was in her hands, her words not really meant for me but for herself: I'll have to accept my daughter is never going to get a degree.

Life has a funny way of twisting expectations. When I graduated from an art college, she was the one who seemed transformed. As if something had clicked inside her, she embraced the world of creativity I had once fought for. I had had no hand in it. I don't know how it happened, but she seemed freer. So much of my mother's real self bloomed when the pressures of active motherhood waned, as I entered my twenties. She painted, crafted, crocheted, her hands suddenly alive with expression. Our outings nearly always involved trips to Art Friend and Spotlight, purchasing yarn, paints, canvases. We'd visit exhibitions together. It was an unspoken apology at first, but one day she said the words aloud: School must have been hell for you. I'm sorry for being so hard on you. I didn't know how repressive it was back then. I was doing my best with what I knew.

I sometimes wondered if The Sound of Music, and Maria's journey through the musical, reminded Amma of her convent education in Hyderabad. Her parents enrolled her in St Ann's High School because they thought an anglophone environment would give her an advantage in post-independence India. The youngest of three, she grew up in the shadow of her older siblings, never able to measure up in her parents' eyes. Praise and admiration seemed reserved for my aunts. My mother felt caught between comparison and dismissal, often treated as an afterthought or too young to take seriously.

Or at least, that was her account of her childhood. My aunt disagrees, claiming her youngest sister was pampered and coddled. My mother was betrothed at the age of 20 in an arranged marriage, shortly after the tragic death of her middle sister in an accident – a loss she felt her parents subtly blamed on her, as though they wanted to wash their hands of her. But she had her way on one crucial aspect of the arrangement: she insisted on pursuing her education and career even after marriage. Her prospective husband, my father, supported her ambitions, a "rare quality in a man" in those days, as she would often say. But his family was deeply traditional. While they allowed her to further her education, they also imposed strict household duties. She was to cook, to clean, and of course, to have children. All these roles were imposed on her. Whatever sternness or pressure she put on me, I realised, were not core traits of her character. When my sister and I grew older, she found her freedom. The inner child in her – the artist – was finally free to express herself.  

When my mother was hospitalised in early May, the doctors made it clear to us that this would be the final time. They offered her the option of intubation in the ICU or receiving treatment in a high-dependency ward. It didn't make sense to a lot of our older relatives when my mother insisted on the latter, which meant choosing to be fully aware at the end of her life. It made perfect sense to me.

In the triage an ER physician asked her What do you think of dying?

She replied, bewildered but composed, well, everyone has to go, I've accepted that. I am…scared. But if it's my time, it's my time.

My mother was always comfortable about talking about death, until, of course, it peeked over the horizon. We'd had a spontaneous conversation about it a few months before her diagnosis.

It had started with us not being able to find a storage space for her artwork.

I mean, who's going to look at this? she asked. And when I'm gone? Only you guys are going to stare at all this.

We both laughed. That hypothetical was still far away. She was 60.

Why don't you come back as a ghost and tell me who you want to give or sell them to? I suggested. We can do guided tours, special ghost edition.

When I go, I'm not going to stick around, she informed me, suddenly serious. I'm going to go on. You don't need to look for me.

But will you pop around to say goodbye? I asked. I was mostly serious: our family isn't religious but we lean spiritual. The way we do at the departures gate at the airport, after you've scanned your passport and before you walk to your gate. The glass panel keeps us apart, but you can turn around, spot me in the crowd, wave a final farewell. A quick little note that you're officially on the other side, heading to the next destination. 

She laughed at the analogy. Nah. I'm sure when I get there I'd have said and done all that was needed. I'm going to go on.

At least tell me what to do with your artwork before you go.

Throw them away. Or, I don't know, open a gallery. It doesn't really matter. She said this not with cynicism but with a facetious practicality.

The joy was in creating.  

As her breathlessness worsened and her discomfort grew, the doctors began administering opioids. Between the medication and her rapidly-depleting oxygen, my mother drifted in and out of confusion, her mind scattered with long, disjointed monologues. She'd wake, caught between sleep and awareness. The doctors assured us this confusion was normal, and that she was no longer in pain.

Where am I? she would ask, deep in her haze.

My sister and I would cradle her hands and her head and guide her back: Observe your breath. Focus on the feeling beneath your nostrils. Witness the feelings as they are.

In those moments, a flicker of recognition would return, and for a brief time, everything seemed to make sense again. Amid the body's ebbs and flows, its growth and decay, breath is an anchor. It grounds, in uncertainty. Mind more opioid than oxygen: breathe. Spirit splitting from flesh, rising into the ether: breathe. Breathe into the unknown. Nothing lasts. Go on.

I'm not certain enough in my psychic intuitive abilities to tell if she did send me a farewell from the transit lounge of the afterlife. There was a levity with which we discussed the hypothetical, that death never felt real. I know nothing prepares any of us for a parent's death at any age. But each time I wake from the recurrent dream I'm slightly addled by it. For a moment I genuinely believe she's not actually dead dead, that she's some kind of extraordinary exception to human mortality, clinically not-alive but still around. Holding my breath for a magical return, and with it, all the memories I can't let go of. To remind myself she isn't, is a daily practice of learning to exhale. So I breathe into the spaces I'm leaving open, trusting that whatever I let go of will remain within me, long after the rest has faded.

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