Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.

I’m drowning in debts up to my ears.

I’ll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

Here’s how it’s arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I’ll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors.

Some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we’ll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless too.

I can’t remember where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it’s the only item

not included on the list.

                ~ Wislawa Szymborska

My neighbor died last week. He was the one who couldn’t leave his house for more than ten minutes at a time, and then only when the maid was there and his wife, so ill with Parkinson’s, had been bathed and dressed and fed and was willing to let him out of her sight for as long as it took him to walk the 350 steps to the shop to bring the milk, the bread, the little box of matches.

“What can I do?” he had said to me just two weeks ago. “There is no one else to look after her.”

I dropped in when I could because my heart went out to them: elderly, frail and alone in a small, neat house. Their one daughter was in Mumbai; their one son in Saharanpur. There were rumors in the neighborhood that the son had mental illness.

Ten days ago, returning home late at night, I saw a man lying in the road. It turned out to be my elderly neighbor’s son. I managed to get him to give me his wife’s phone number and learned from her that her husband was supposed to be at his parents’ place, that his mother had been admitted to the hospital and that his father was there with her. When I suggested that perhaps I should call an ambulance and have the son admitted as well, she begged me to just escort him to his parents’ house where he could wait on the verandah for his father to return.

“My husband is depressed,” she explained.  “He’s a diabetic. How much can my father-in-law take on?”

How much indeed? With help from some neighbors, we got Mr Tandon’s son safely home. We gave him something to eat and drink; we gave him a mattress, pillow and quilts and about half an hour later, his father arrived back from the hospital and moved him inside.

I thought about him often in the next few days: his wife in a coma; his son also in need of support,  he himself nearly 80. Who would look after him? He was so essential to preventing the house of cards that was their life from collapsing that even to ask the question seemed disloyal.

Man sitting on the edge of a mountain, looking out over a vast vista

Disloyal, yet, as it turned out, essential.

Mr Tandon dropped dead a few days later. No one asked him if he was ready. No one checked to make sure he had made all the arrangements for his wife, for his son, for his grandchildren. One day he was here; the next day, he was gone. And all the balls he was keeping up in the air fell briefly to the ground and were then gathered up by others and tossed back into the fray.

We think we are irreplaceable and we construct our lives around that belief. And we are. And we are not. That awareness forms the tension and the complete truth we all have to live with and learn to balance: We are irreplaceable. We are nothing.

We live out our lives on a razor’s edge, knowing, if we know anything, that a single moment, an accident, a simple twist of fate, could change everything. We act as if we are essential and eternal yet we know that we are not and that at any moment,we could be snatched away and the world would continue just as it always has.

Mr Tandon is dead. His wife remains in a coma; his son still has depression. Nothing has changed. Yet everything is different.

Nothing’s a gift. It’s all on loan. Remember.

Showing 5 comments
  • megha
    Reply

    It is indeed thought provoking…you are right…everything changes in a flash of a moment..

  • Lakshmi
    Reply

    Yes……we can never ever take life for granted!

  • deepti chandola
    Reply

    this sense of all important and nothingness at the same time do overwelhm more often than not now,,,

  • charu
    Reply

    Real moving write up…We the ‘irreplaceable nothings’ keep worrying about things which are beyond our control….How little do we matter in the larger scheme of things!(But the way you write always has an impact on me,Thanks Jo, for reminding us of the things we tend to think ‘we know’).

  • Devendra Chauhan
    Reply

    hi jo..reminds me of what someone had posted on a FB page “there is no edge to life..life is an edge”

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