It was 1pm California time and 1:30am India time. I was on a phone call with a doctor thousands of miles away while my father was struggling for his life on that same continent. Covid-19 took his life soon after that phone call. I couldn’t do enough to prevent this tragedy. And I am not alone.
India is suffering. Ask any Indian and they would know at least 8-10 people who have died of Covid-19 in the last few weeks. I lost my high school classmate, friend’s father, my aunt and her oldest son, and my father in chronological order in just few weeks’ time. I know many more deaths of people we have known for years. It’s a shared grief, a suffering that we will stay with us for years to come. People are struggling for basic needs, the healthcare system has collapsed, and it feels like a war.
Sitting thousands of miles away from ground zero, I was, and I still am feeling helpless. My mother is in the hospital fighting Covid-19. The only tool I have is social media and my friends from college. It took us hundreds of phone calls and seven hours to get a six-liter oxygen cylinder to keep Papa alive for one night. He woke up with his blood oxygen levels dropped to 54% the next morning and he fell unconscious. I was frantically trying to find an ambulance from California. I Google searched for “ambulance in Faridabad” and got 4 pages of results. I started calling the first few numbers but none of them worked. One ambulance service said the waitlist is till tomorrow. Time was passing and Papa’s oxygen levels were declining. With some divine intervention, I got an idea to go to the last page of search results and found a phone number from the image of an ambulance. The ambulance was available. Papa was rushed to the hospital and was admitted into the ICU with BiPAP support. It was a miracle that how everything just worked out in that few hours. I was happy that Papa was able to get to the hospital, get an ICU bed with oxygen support, and thought he would be fine. We received a call from my mom that night that Papa had a cardiac arrest. I was still hopeful that the doctor would save him. He passed away in a few minutes after that at 2am India time. It’s an unimaginable loss that I knew was inevitable but didn’t know it will happen like this and it will hurt so much. We couldn’t be there in his last moments and we are still not there to grieve with my mom. I was not prepared for this.
My dad was the most positive person I know. He was generous, funny, personable, and loved by everyone who came in contact with him. I was the youngest in the family, the most pampered one by all means. I called him “yaar” that means friend in Hindi. Papa always supported me in everything, he encouraged me, stood up for me, and he cheered for me in all my successes. The day before hospitalization from Covid-19 related symptoms, I called him, and he asked me, “how I was doing?”. I was annoyed because it was not about me in that moment. He was the one with fever and low oxygen. But for him, he was not sick. He was fine. He made me laugh till the last time we spoke to each other. I have his photo with his typical smile on my bedside table and I can feel his presence. I do not know how or when would I ever be able to overcome this grief. This heartache, a physical pain, I have never experienced before, and I will never wish this on anyone.
But I can’t also stop thinking about millions of people feeling what I am feeling right now. It’s a shared suffering. I remember feeling helpless weeks before the tragedy. I’m feeling helpless now. It’s a horrible feeling to know that millions of people like me were not able to be with their loved ones in their last moments. Open any social media and search “Covid India”, you will see a plethora of pleading requests for Oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, ICU units, ventilators, etc. And in a few hours, you will see “post locked because the person has passed away”. It’s heartbreaking and infuriating. The Indian government has failed us. It’s a tragedy that should haunt all the politicians for the rest of their lives. I wish we had a time machine, and we could go back to the peaceful 2019.
We find solace in the fact that we tried our best to save Papa from across the globe and that he didn’t suffer in his last moments. He always wanted a peaceful death and received one in the end. For me, his legacy of helping others, being jolly, and making other laugh would stay with me forever. And one more time I want to make him proud by taking his legacy forward.
Nidhi (Papa’s Janu).
Papa and Me, Stanford University, 2018.
Nidhi Sharma 