The Excerpt Of Goodbye, Amma: Grief with Grace
An excerpt from Goodbye, Amma: Grief with Grace, A Memoir by Chitra Gopalakrishnan, published by Hawakal Publishers, reflects on Vimala Jayaram’s life—a journey navigating a century of historical upheavals, gendered constraints, and deep personal resilience with quiet dignity.
I thought my mother, Amma, as we called her, would quietly pass away in her nineties, much like how she lived—discreetly and privately. She would leave calmly and in control of circumstances, avoiding any unnecessary drama around her death.
She had endured the complexities of India’s historical struggles, marked by numerous events, each constrained by gendered norms, where equality and equity felt distant.
If I were to select a few periods within her life, it would be the devastation and destruction of the Second World War, when India, then part of the British Empire, declared war on Germany in 1939. As a child in school, she was caught in its crossfire: blackouts and emergency drills. She soon became part of India’s long struggle for independence, taking part in marches and boycotts, followed by its partition in 1947, whose shameful secrets remain buried deep within her generation’s collective memory. Subsequently, she experienced and was impacted by numerous bloody interstate conflicts over the years. I would also include her life during the socialist era of early independence, marked by cycles of austerity and growth; her firsthand experiences of the free-market economy in the 1990s, which brought impressive economic booms amid sociocultural tensions; her navigation of the current right-wing regime; and her resilience through multiple deadly waves of COVID.
Over the course of the century, she endured these events and developed a gentle self-awareness that brought calm and order to her daily life. She practised steady restraint and patience, learning to find strength in pain, hurt, and disappointment, preferring silence to discussing her hardships aloud. This reinforced her belief that addressing life’s crises with compassion is essential for renewing faith.
She experienced many different cultures and insular worlds during her life, whether in Myanmar, Bareilly, Nashik, Mumbai, Nagpur, Shimla, Delhi, Bengaluru, Secunderabad, or Chennai—places she lived in due to her father’s military postings and her husband’s frequent job changes—where the roughness of the human condition was evident.
She endured thirty years in a growing joint family that upheld the ethic of ‘there is room for everyone,’ which minimised individual ambitions. Yet she still pushed through her career after marriage despite lacking close support. When nuclear families became common, she adapted to a structure that promoted smaller loyalties but greater personal freedom. After becoming widowed, she courageously experienced living alone for several years, focusing on her own needs and independence for the first time, before moving in with me in 2012.
Her name was Vimala Jayaram. She said Vimala was pronounced in the South Indian way, with emphasis on ‘a’, unlike Vimla, a name common in North India, but without the ‘a’.
Because of her skill in blending the complex challenges of her life—its extremities—with her conscience and mental disposition—without harsh emotion or action—I envisioned that one day I might wake up to find Amma’s small, fragile body succumbed in the creased hollow of the blue-grey sofa she had used as her bed in our New Delhi home for many years.
I pictured her in her room, bird-like in her brittle bravado, her expression serene and secure, her coverlet unrumpled.
Because she never walked dangerously close to the edge of life and quietly navigated her existence without taking up excessive space, despite inhabiting her world fully, I convinced myself that the delicate threads of her world would stay intact and remain unaware of the weight of her death.
Book Details:
- Title: Goodbye, Amma: Grief with Grace
- Author: Chitra Gopalakrishnan
- Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
- Release Date: 1 October 2026
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 136 pages
- Price: 400 INR
- Where to buy: https://www.amazon.in/Goodbye-Amma-Grief-Chitra-Gopalakrishnan
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