The Final Lesson

My father died on December 18, 1986. He was seventy years old. In the decades since, that date has stayed with me, not because I make a conscious effort to remember it, but because it remembers me. It is a day that sits permanently in the calendar of my soul, a marker of the moment when the “Patriarch” transitioned from a living force to a silent legacy.

That evening followed a familiar, reassuring rhythm. I was a lecturer at Sevagram Medical College then, and my life was neatly divided between the white-walled intensity of the hospital and the grounding presence of home. My commute was a ritual of its own: I would ride back on my Bajaj scooter for dinner, return to Sevagram the same night for my duties, and come home again the next day for lunch. It was a life moved by regularity, measured in the eight-kilometer stretches of road between Wardha and the college.

The December Sweat

When I reached home around seven that evening, the air was cool with the onset of winter, but the atmosphere inside was heavy. I sensed at once that something was amiss. My father was uneasy, slightly breathless, and uncharacteristically restless. He said little, which was his habit, but his silence felt different—it was the silence of a man preoccupied with an internal struggle he couldn’t quite name.

He went to the toilet—a ritual he had performed unfailingly before dinner for nearly sixty years—and when he returned, he was drenched in sweat. In the medical world, we are taught to look for “red flags,” and seeing a man drenched in sweat in the middle of a cold December unsettled me deeply. As I watched him, his breathing became labored. Against my will, my mind began to flip through the pages of his medical history: his first heart attack in 1977, when I was a fourth-year student in Nagpur; his second, four years later. He had diabetes and hypertension—the classic markers of a heart under siege.

The clinical signs aligned with a cruel, undeniable clarity. His failing heart was no longer pumping effectively; fluid was beginning to collect in his lungs. The “Physician Son” in me took over. I told him we had to go to the hospital immediately.

The Stillness in the Back Seat

Even the short walk to the car was an ordeal for him. Every movement required an effort that left him gasping for air. Dr. B. C. Chandak, our neighbor and a practicing physician, offered to drive us to Sevagram Hospital. My brother sat in the front seat, gripped by the urgency of the moment. I sat in the back, holding my father close, trying to be the anchor for a man who had always been mine.

Four kilometers into that eight-kilometer journey—exactly halfway between the life he had built and the hospital I served—he became suddenly, profoundly still.

I felt for his pulse. There was none. I placed my ear against his chest, hoping—against all medical knowledge, against all reason—to hear something, a flutter, a click, anything. But his chest no longer rose. The silence in the back of that car was absolute. My father had died in my lap. Nothing in my medical training, no textbook on cardiology or emergency medicine, prepares you for that instant when a body you know intimately becomes irrevocably unfamiliar. The finality was swift, a quiet exit on a dark road.

The Flat Line at Sevagram

We reached the Medicine ICU within minutes, but the “minutes” no longer mattered. Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, a dear colleague who knew my father and me well, was there with the residents. The machinery of modern medicine hummed into life—an ECG was taken, drugs were administered, and resuscitation began. I stood there, watching the flat line on the monitor, a stark contrast to the vibrant, disciplined life my father had led.

After a few minutes, I looked at Ulhas. I saw the futility in his eyes, and he saw the realization in mine. “Stop,” I told him. He understood, he agreed, and the room went silent.

We returned home to tell my mother. Her grief was raw and uncontained, a primal response to the sudden severing of a forty-six-year companionship. Though she lived with the daily knowledge of his heart disease, she had never imagined this abrupt ending. That night, as the family gathered around her, sitting in a silence that felt heavier than words, we shared the first few hours of a world without Bhaiji.

The Simple Rite of Reason

The funeral was held the next day at four in the afternoon. By then, the house was filled with the people who formed my father’s world—relatives like Asha, Pushpa, and Ashok Bajaj, alongside a vast crowd from Wardha. My father had always lived by reason rather than ritual. He encouraged us to question every custom and to discard anything that felt hollow or performed. In keeping with his spirit, we kept the farewell simple.

There were no shaved heads. There was no reading of the Garud Puran. There was no display of staged grief—only a quiet, profound dignity. As the funeral pyre was lit and his body returned to ash, I felt the unmistakable sense that an era had quietly closed. The man who had refused to let his bride wear a veil was now departing a world he had tried to make more rational.

A few days later, Radhakrishnaji Bajaj, my father’s mentor, traveled with us on the Dakshin Express to Haridwar. His presence was steady and consoling as we made the journey to the Ganges. We performed the immersion ourselves—no priests, no chanted mantras, no bustling crowds. Just the quiet, endless flow of the water carrying away what remained of a life lived with extraordinary discipline.

The Gift of a Good Death

Looking back now, I realize my father died exactly as he would have wished. He was a man who prized independence above all else, and he was spared the one thing he would have found unbearable: the loss of his autonomy. He was never confined to a bed. He did not suffer prolonged, agonizing pain. There were no tubes, no monitors, and no helpless waiting in the shadows of a chronic illness.

As fearless in death as he was in life, he slipped away quickly, without drama and without indignity. At the time, as a young lecturer, I did not have the words for it. I had not yet learned to speak of “dying with dignity.” Today, as a senior physician, I speak of it often to my patients and their families. I prepare them, gently, for the possibility of a peaceful end, away from the invasive machinery of the ICU.

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