The Cost of His Ambition

They say you shouldn't speak evil of the dead because they are dead and no longer have the power to narrate their side of the story. But if the dead person is someone you grew up with, shared a life with, and had an entire human being with, I think that dead person owes the other all the venting she has inside her. 

For someone who was so intelligent on paper, until this day my life's greatest mystery will be trying to understand how he was so stupid in real life. How could he have chosen work over and over again every single day for as long as he lived over his own family? How? How could he have died after a pitch meeting? How could he have died in the arms of colleagues and not mine? How exactly did that IIT Bombay Dual Degree holder in Mechanical Engineering let this happen to him, our son, and me?

I was so angry and disappointed with him for years after he died. He wasn't with me in the hospital during my delivery, he didn't stay at home while I carried our son, he missed our son's first birthday, and he missed most of our wedding anniversaries. Every expensive cake and roses he sent on a yearly basis didn't cut his presence. 

My late husband has taught me the biggest life lesson—wealth and material things don't matter, human life does. We have two houses in Bombay. Do you know who lives inside them now? Cobwebs and darkness—the exact same thing that lives in my brain now, trying to figure out the purpose of my late husband's life. What was his purpose? To widow a woman at 34 with a 2-year-old? Slow claps for his soul in heaven or whichever godforsaken place he's chosen to go.

Whenever I saw bosses at work flip from party mode to work mode in ten seconds, attending meetings after a whole night of partying, I would look at my colleague and say, "Oh look! That's how my husband died at 35." 

I remember the faces of all his bosses and colleagues, and honestly, they disappoint too. That entire organization and my husband reek of slime. Men in coats—I didn't trust them for a very, very long time, until I had to re-don one four months after he passed and I realized not all suits are evil; I'm not evil. 

I'm a mother first, a corporate worker next—look at the order of my priorities. I've shut down from work on all the days my child and parents have fallen sick. Family first, always. These are the values I've grown up watching. So people choosing work over family and humans simply don't impress me. Just no.

It was only when I chose to forgive him that I found peace, and I'm no longer haunted by his traumatized ghost who knows he's done our family wrong. For all the heartbreak he made me endure, I know he loved me too—so much that I've never found another like him, until now. 

I forgive you, Poopie. I know you're at peace because I finally am.