Swarupa Mitra, Director and Unit Head at Fortis Memorial Research Institute – India, shared on LinkedIn:
“For the Students I Wasn’t Ready to Lose – A Teacher’s Day Ode
This morning, on Teacher’s Day as the screens of the mobile phones got flooded with messages of regards and gratitude, I cannot stop my mind from wandering to years back to three of my dear students who left the world too early.
Inderjeet. Upasna. Jwala.
Three young Oncologists . Three bright lives. Three very different journeys-their lives interrupted too soon.
INDER
Her smiling face, the long plait tossing across her back, The girl who spent every moment caring for others was suddenly confronted with a catastrophe–a rare lung cancer. Life was painfully unfair. Her journey from a Post graduate student to an oncologist to a mother had been so vivid. After battling with the disease for more than a year, she finally succumbed–As I watched her on the hospital bed, clinging on to the arm of her husband,
I asked the Almighty..God, ‘ Why She?’
UPASNA
Left through a tragedy none of us could have imagined. Probably a fatal drug reaction-an unforeseen twist in a life that brought joy and happiness to everyone she met. Her gleeful chatter, her resonating laughter, still tugs at my heart. Medicine reminds us with brutal humility that despite all our knowledge, we are still vulnerable to the unpredictability of life.
But I asked the Almighty once again God, ‘Why She?’
And then it was JWALA …
Her demise carries a Smothering silence. Suicide leaves behind questions that have no answers, conversations that can never be completed, and a haunting ‘What if?’ that no teacher can ever resolve. Thinking back I wonder if those uncertainties she sometimes felt, the shell she often withdrew in, the turbulence of relationships she talked about, troubled her heart so deep.
And one last time I found myself asking the Almighty God, ‘Why She?’
I received no response to my ardent question -God, ‘ Why She’?
Today what remains is memory of -Their laughter. Their chatters. Their enthusiasm. Their anxieties. Their aspirations.
A rainy afternoon, a song drifting from somewhere far away, a piece of scribbled paper hidden in a thick book, few empty tea cups on the OPD table – pull me back to those days. The little moments in corridors, fleeting in OPDs and clinics that seemed so ordinary then, today have become intensely precious memories.
Perhaps the hardest truth about being a teacher is that Your Students do not remain your students. They become inseparable pieces of your life.
You watch them grow, struggle, stumble, succeed and eventually walk beyond you. You feel proud when they become better than you.
And when one of them is gone, a small part of the teacher goes with them.
Today, on Teacher’s Day, I remember these three-not only with grief, but with gratitude. For having known them.
- For having taught them.
- For having learnt from them.
- For having been, even briefly, a part of their lives.
To you – Inder, Upasna and Jwala with love.”
You can also read:
Don Dizon’s Heartfelt Piece in NEJM Dedicated to Rachna Shroff’s Cancer Diagnosis
