Lilamayi Subhadra

On this day last year my older sister left her body in a violent car crash. I heard my mother’s hysterical voice on the phone repeating the words, but somehow it didn’t make sense. It was as if she was speaking to me in a foreign language - I heard words, but they had no meaning. My body was reacting in a strange way - my mouth dried up and my heart was pounding, my breathing heavy, my body numb. I’m usually a very calm person, I don’t get carried away by situations, but somehow I lost composure and became bewildered.

At that time, I came face to face with the reality of death. I took it upon myself to identify the body (My mother was already too traumatized to deal with it, my one sister was in hospital, seriously injured - she was in the car when it happened, and my youngest sister is my youngest sister and was naturally being protected from all the horror). They live in a small town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by rural townships so you can imagine the state of things in the morgue there. Bodies were everywhere… the one that was once inhabited by my sister was still as it was early that morning when it happened - a complete mess. I had with me some sacred items - dust from holy Vrindavan and Mayapur, Tulasi leaves offered to Sri Sri Radha Syamasundara and 1008 Tirtha Jal (water from 1008 sacred rivers that was once offered to Srila Prabhupada). With some difficulty I placed these in the mouth - the staff were looking on in amazement, not thinking to assist. Afterwards I had to sign a register to confirm that it was indeed her body and noticed, as the official paged through the book, some information contained within; most causes of death were from hanging - suicide. So empty and painful is life in this material world for so many entities, that the only way out to is to try and escape the body that one has become so attached to during the course of this lifetime.

Next I visited the scene of the accident, blew the conschell there and sang prayers to Lord Nrisimhadeva as well as the Maha-mantra. I wanted to do everything possible to help her in some way. It struck me how many living entities leave their bodies everyday and how frightening it must be for each of them not having the proper knowledge to deal with this experience, I silently thanked my Spiritual Master and Srila Prabhupada for making the truth available to me and realized the need to make it available to others.

The next day I took some cloth offered to Srimati Radharani for the cleaned body to be wrapped in, I watched them seal the coffin. When the body was finally cremated, I felt greatly relieved - it was a heavy experience and now some of that heaviness was lifted. Still the chaos remained - she left behind her husband and little 6 year old daughter (who, after the initial shock, seemed to understand better than the others), my sister in hospital initially wouldn’t accept that her big sister, her best friend had died and she had survived. My mother was finished. Everyone else was pretty finished too. At one stage I was thinking “Can you please come back so everything can be normal?” but it wasn’t going to happen. She had to surrender to a frightening and painful death. We had to surrender to all that came with it. Like Maharaja Yudhistira once said - the most wonderful thing is that people die all around us and still we don’t realize it will happen to us. When people die, everyone seems so surprised “It’s just so unexpected…” We all know we’re going to die, but actually we don’t know. (A friend and fellow Pilates instructor recently told me that she is not afraid of death, she has a feeling that she will go peacefully - I don’t think there is such a thing - peaceful death). Life carries on - we busy ourselves trying to make things comfortable here, trying to convince ourselves that everything is ok. HH Devamrita Swami was once describing a farm where lambs were kept that were meant for slaughter - the farmer had planted neat rows of lettuces and other yummy green things for them to nibble on in abundance. The little lambs felt so happy there, unaware of their ghastly fate. Like that we forget the temporariness of our present situation. The truth is - the soul is eternal, death is foreign to us, so when the body (that we identify with so deeply) dies, it will be difficult and unpleasant… unless we have the proper knowledge to make sense of it all and to become free from this painful experience.