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153. It's an Honor to Write About My Mother- with Farah
97 Plays1 year ago
Farah, an avid baker, yogi, with a 30-year career in the banking industry across continents. Her mother-daughter relationship memoir Meher & Me is a tale of an unconventional life and courage developed through a combination of nature, nurture, and skills acquired along the way. It is a memoir about the life we choose for the lessons we will learn. Farah is of Parsi origin, was born in London, but raised in North India, where she was educated at a Catholic convent in a historic Muslim city, surrounded by Hindu mythology. She is a British national with an Indian heart. She has embraced the different facets of her identity, and considers herself a citizen of the world, with the ability to straddle different cultures and geographies with ease.
She works in the banking industry, where she started as a trainee aged eighteen in London, having built her career over the span of thirty-plus years across continents.
In her personal life, following the untimely loss of her mother, Farah, struggling to reconcile the mysteries of life and death, embarked on an inward quest to find the strength to overcome the traumatic family tragedy and other significant life challenges. Through self-healing practices ranging from baking to yoga, Farah was able to find a positive conduit to channel her loss and pain, finally arriving at a place of equanimity.
Farah is based in Dubai where she has lived for the last two decades. She has two adult children, who are embarking on their life journeys. In her spare time, Farah is an avid baker and dreams of owning a cafe one day. Her other passion is Yoga, and she can often be found on the mat, at a class across Dubai.
https://www.farahpress.com/
https://www.griefgratitudeandthegrayinbetween.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to the Soul's Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
So I read something that I loved that really resonated with me. Deepak Chopra, and I think I read it or I heard him, I can't remember which, we were talking about, he was talking about dying and after life and what happened. And someone said to him, what happens to the soul after we pass on? And he said, if you can think of a room, he said, air is all around us. But when you erect a room and create the four walls, there's air within those four walls, but there's also air around it.
00:00:28
Speaker
If those four walls are taken down, the air just mingles with the air outside. So he says it's saved for the soul and the body. When the body goes, the soul just goes back to this universe of souls that it's come from. So the way he framed it resonated with me. And that's like how I want to believe mom is out there.
Podcast Introduction: Grief and Gratitude
00:00:54
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:17
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
Introducing Farah and Her Memoir 'Meher and Me'
00:01:38
Speaker
On today's episode, I am chatting with Farah. She is an avid baker, a yogi with a 30-year career in the banking industry across continents. She can also add now to her list of things she does. She is also now an author. She is the author of Meher and Me.
00:01:59
Speaker
which is a tale of unconventional life and courage developed through a combination of nature, nurture, and skills acquired along the way. And it's a memoir, a mother-daughter relationship memoir. So welcome, Farah.
Mother's Day and Memoir Relevance
00:02:17
Speaker
Thank you. Thanks, Kendra. Thank you for having me on the show and look forward to our conversation. Right, sort of topical for Upcoming Mother's Day. So I think it's very,
00:02:29
Speaker
Timely, shall we say? Timely. When I post this will be passed because we're talking right before Mother's Day. And so when I post this will be just a few days after Mother's Day. And so, yes, it's right in the season. And Mother's Day was actually celebrated in some Latin American countries. It's a date. It's not the actual weekend. It's May 10th. Right. It's like so- Whatever day of the week it is. Yeah, and so it also happened.
Farah's Diverse Upbringing and Identity
00:02:54
Speaker
Well, welcome to the podcast. I usually start the conversation with asking people where they're calling from. I know we had to kind of have that conversation before scheduling, yes, the episode. So please share where you live and where you actually are from.
00:03:12
Speaker
OK, thank you. So I am actually speaking from Dubai, UAE. It is past seven in the evening, so we're opposite ends of the time zone. And originally, I was born in London. I'm a Parsi by faith Zoroastrian, which is people of Persian origin. And I grew up in a small town in northern India called Lucknow.
00:03:36
Speaker
And I went to a Catholic convent, grew up in a Muslim city surrounded by Hindu mythology. So, citizen of the world, I'd like to think. You know what? That's actually in my... I ride Peloton, the bike. Right. And in the where you're from, I wrote World Citizen. That's my... So, I'm like you. I'm a world citizen. And aren't we all? I hope that that ends up being more the way we are.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Where some of our experiences and our locations are non-geography. Absolutely. And the experiences, some of our experiences, that actually says a lot because it's also those interactions that you have with people that are from other places that also compound your own knowledge and understanding of the world.
Parenting and Fulfillment
00:04:26
Speaker
You're also a mother. You have two children.
00:04:30
Speaker
I do. I have a daughter and a son. They're at university sort of growing their lives, taking off on their own journeys. And it's such a
00:04:41
Speaker
pleasure and a privilege to have brought two people into the world to hopefully have two well-adjusted humans and see them doing their own thing and become independent. It's really very fulfilling.
Confronting Tragedy: Mother's Passing
00:04:55
Speaker
Farah, this book is written of your memories of you and your mother. Your mother was Meher and you share a lot of
00:05:06
Speaker
beauty about her. You mentioned about her elegance and her beauty. And as I'm seeing you here as we're recording, I can see that beauty and elegance in you as well. Thank you. So you wrote this a few years after she died. She died in 2006, a very sudden and surprising circumstances. So if you want to share just briefly about that of how it was your mom
00:05:36
Speaker
died, and then we shall kind of navigate from there. Sure. So, mum lived in Lucknow, which is where I grew up.
00:05:48
Speaker
And she had gone out late one evening to collect my sister-in-law, my brother's wife, from her home. And as my sister-in-law exited the building, there were four young gentlemen hanging around in the parking lot. And in India, we call it Eve's teasing, so it's sort of making lewd comments, calling out cat-calling, you know, just sort of, if you like,
00:06:12
Speaker
harassing young ladies. Anyway, so these four gentlemen made some lewd comments at my sister-in-law. Mom was in the car, so she didn't actually hear what was said, but she saw my sister-in-law's reaction. So my mother was quite a feisty lady, a lawyer by profession, chain smoker. So off she stepped from the car with her cigarette in hand and sort of called out to the young gentleman and said, what was that about? And
00:06:36
Speaker
you all have sisters and mothers, and this is not the way to behave. Now, it was late at night, these gentlemen had a bit to drink, and I think were possibly using other substances, not confirmed, but they were also petty criminals, which again, wasn't known at the time. So of the four, three, she said to them, you need to apologize to the young lady, don't do this again, da, da, da. Sort of gave them a little bit of a talking to. Three of the gentlemen apologized, one didn't.
00:07:06
Speaker
So when mum insisted that they apologized, they sort of turned around and ran away. And mum called out to our driver to sort of pursue them. And we were the way she was, the location was close to the police commissioner's house. And she said, get the police to help chase these young gentlemen. Anyway, the one guy who hadn't apologized stopped, turned around in his tracks, came back, stood at mum.
00:07:30
Speaker
took out a gun from his pocket. It was a sawn-off barrel. It's called a kata in India. Took the gun out, said, sorry auntie, aimed it at her and pulled the trigger. And the bullet entered from the side, so it pierced her vertebra, side of her spine, pierced her vertebra, and she fell back from the impact. So landed on her left side, broke her arm, and her leg was paralyzed immediately.
00:08:01
Speaker
And that's sort of where she was taken to hospital and sort of deteriorated from there on.
Immediate Response to Tragic News
00:08:07
Speaker
Was it about 25 days after the gunshot? She was taken to a hospital, correct. So initially we took her past. Yeah, initially we took her to the hospital in Lucknow, but it wasn't equipped to be able to deal with her injuries. So she was airlifted to Delhi, which is the capital of India, to hospital there.
00:08:26
Speaker
And she was in hospital for 25 days and, you know, she seemed to be recovering almost against all the odds and against what logic would say. And then there was just a tremendous amount of internal bleeding and they were unable to identify the source of the bleeding. And then she slipped away sort of 25 days later.
00:08:46
Speaker
25 and you were not living in the same city. So you're in another you at that moment, where were you when you received this phone call of her being shot?
00:08:58
Speaker
So the incident occurred late in the evening, end of February, and I was back in Dubai. I lived in, I've been living in Dubai for the last 22 years. So I was in Dubai with my children. It was late at night. It was middle of our nights. Must've been two, three in the morning when the phone rang. And normally I would keep my phone on silent at night. So it was not to be disturbed, but my husband was traveling at the time and I just left the ringer on just in case he needed to reach me or if there was anything.
00:09:24
Speaker
which is the only reason the call even came through because if it had been on silent, I might not have received that call. And my stepfather told me about the incident. So the next day I had to find a flight and the flights were not as frequent. The only flight was late in the evening and I was waiting for my husband to come back from his business trip, which was out of town. So I could leave my children who were quite young at the time with him and head over to Delhi, which is where I flew into.
00:09:51
Speaker
You know, when I was reading your book, there were so many different components of it. One of the things that I noticed, aside from you, of course, navigating this relationship that you had with your mom and your grief was, of course, also this reconciliation of yourself and your own journey in your life.
Reflections on Family and Belonging
00:10:13
Speaker
And there were so many things that
00:10:15
Speaker
occurred in your life that would be considered also moments of grief your parents divorce what would be one of those aspects as well even your mom remarrying all these kind of things do stir up a lot of different emotions and and grief and and this
00:10:36
Speaker
The common thread that's throughout it as well is the belonging part, like the who are you and where did you fit. So tell us a little more about this, about you growing up and I'll go back again to your mom and I didn't want to do it so abruptly right now as I'm changing kind of the subject because we'll go back into that.
00:10:59
Speaker
But more about you and your your upbringing and your journey. Sure. Thank you. So I think we started off with saying we're citizens of the world, but that sort of title is really hard one. It doesn't come easy. And if you think
00:11:18
Speaker
many, many, many years ago. I've got gray hair, not that the listeners will be able to see, but, you know, we've got age on our side. But when I started out, London, I was in London till I was four. So I was born in London, lived in London till I was four. And that was all I knew. And as a child, everything is normal because that's all you know. And then I was taken to Lucknow to see my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. My mom took me over the winter or sent me
00:11:47
Speaker
sort of up ahead of her over the winter, supposedly for a month. And then we ended up through a series of circumstances where my mother decided to stay on in India because my father was not, shall we say, behaving the way one should.
00:12:01
Speaker
And so I am uprooted from what I have known for my three, four years to a place that isn't familiar, the language isn't the same, everything about it, the smells, the culture, the customs, the ambiance, the environment, the weather, everything is different.
Cultural Adaptation and Identity Quest
00:12:22
Speaker
So initially when you're in your mother's home or your maternal grandmother's home, it's okay, you're cocooned.
00:12:28
Speaker
But then once mum made the decision that we were going to stay there, I am now starting to go to school in a foreign country with the language that I don't speak.
00:12:38
Speaker
Hindi was not my native language at the time. And even though I could hear it around me as I spent a couple of months there, I still didn't speak it. And then I looked a bit different. I'm in India, there's this term called wheat-ish to describe, you know, like a complexion. I'm possibly slightly on the paler side of that. I had
00:12:59
Speaker
big curly hair. And I spoke different because I spoke with a British accent in a small town in India. So there was so many reasons for me to stand out and be differentiated, that belonging or feeling that sameness that a child craves wasn't there. So it was really hard. And that emotional parenting that is perhaps more commonplace today was not the style back then, or at least not the style that I experienced.
00:13:28
Speaker
So it was challenging, it was difficult, it wasn't easy and as you mentioned the divorce was something that would trigger me. I would see children with their fathers or sitting in their father's lap and I remember bursting into tears thinking why is my father not there and people hadn't seen my father and there would be all sorts of questions and all sorts of inappropriate comments that young children will make without meaning to be super mean but there can be mean comments made.
00:13:58
Speaker
And my stepfather was a whole different journey and he and my mother dated for many many years before they eventually got married but that was also not an easy relationship to navigate because
00:14:10
Speaker
he was more traditional in his thinking, whereas I grew up in my grandmother's home, which she was very liberal. My mother was very liberal, very, with a different thought process to what girls should be able to say or see or do. And then when I was 18, I went back to London and that sort of became the journey of discovering myself and who I was and finding my voice and
00:14:36
Speaker
learning to be comfortable in my own skin. It's okay to say, you know, I'm a Farsi or I'm British or I'm Indian, but I don't have to be any one thing. I can be, as you said, an amalgamation of all of that. And I am far today and I have had experiences that enhance, if you like, my world point of view. So that's where I'm at today.
Cultural Conflict in Funeral Traditions
00:15:00
Speaker
I love that word enhance. It is so true. It does enhance our lives when we are more in touch with a bigger picture than our own. So in this dynamic of the dynamics of the relationships and with your stepfather, after your mom died,
00:15:21
Speaker
There was a big decision that had to be made as well, which was even of her burial, which, by the way, you mentioned your mom was an avid smoker. And can you share that little quote of what your mom would say she wanted to be buried with? So my mom had started smoking when she was 15 means in those days, the height of rebellion was smoking and drinking secretly. And in India, everything's done.
00:15:47
Speaker
behind closed doors, right? Never in front of the parents. So mom had started sneaking cigarettes when she was 15. And then as she had gone through life, she had adopted smoking Dunhill. So she always moved on. And she always said, just make sure that packets of Dunhill buried in with me. So she had a good sense of humor. She had a good sense of humor. Amazing sense of humor. Even in the trickiest of times, she would deadpan something and you're like, mom, really, you know,
00:16:16
Speaker
But yeah, Parsis were typically buried. We also have what they call towers of silence, but there's only one in India in Bombay.
00:16:25
Speaker
a whole different ritual and a process but traditionally we're buried, we sort of back to the earth to give back so the body decomposes, it nurtures the earth and that's where we came from is the sort of practice behind it. Whereas my stepfather was Hindu and in Hindus you don't bury, you cremate. Parties wouldn't cremate because we believe fire is pure and we believe fire purifies.
00:16:51
Speaker
fire sort of rises from a base to a pinnacle. It's not something we would defile by putting a dead body in it. So there was a huge conflict of burial versus cremation. In our small hometown of Lackawanna, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother and maternal grandfather buried in the
00:17:09
Speaker
in the cemetery there. And that's where mom had said she wanted to be buried. But because my mother had married out of the community, Farsi's were very, you're sort of in the community and we're a very small niche community. If you marry out, it's sort of excommunicated, there are new sort of divergent streams and pockets of the religion that are coming up where if say, the father marries out, it's okay, there's a very new
00:17:39
Speaker
team in California, I believe, where the mother marries out, it's also considered okay, but given it's a patriarchal society, typically that would not be the norm. So we have this debate raging about, do we bury her? And the Parsi community was, she's married out, so she's not eligible, if you like, to be buried in our cemetery. But my mother's very, very old, dear school friend was the president of the Parsi community at the time.
00:18:06
Speaker
and helped us navigate the decision making to allow her to be buried next to her mother. So my mother got buried along with her cigarettes and along with a couple of packs of cards because she used to play cards with her buddies. So yeah, the cigarettes and the cards had to be snuck in under the sheets and they went with her.
00:18:26
Speaker
So it was a couple of cards and there was some incident in the book, I think you mentioned, was it your, I know you call uncle, you say uncle, love uncle is your stepdad. So the word uncle and auntie are an endearing for somebody that's really close to the family, is that correct?
00:18:48
Speaker
the terminology so in india if you are related by blood there are specific terms so a mother's brother is mama a mother sister is masi a father's brother if younger
Cultural Rituals in Burial
00:18:59
Speaker
is cha cha father's brother order is tau so there's specific terms for each blood relationship or by marriage relationship.
00:19:07
Speaker
anyone who's older than you, but not directly related to you, out of respect, you would say, auntie or uncle, you wouldn't address them by name and you wouldn't go misses or, you know, mister. Um, so auntie and uncle is typically out of respect and love uncle was older, not directly related. So that's how I started addressing him when I first met him. Um, and that's the terminology that stayed. So, um, yeah, tell the story about the car, something regarding, he was looking for another deck of cards.
00:19:38
Speaker
So mum played a particular style of Rami with 23 cards and you needed three decks of cards to play that particular game. So when we buried her, we buried her with three decks of cards but a couple of nights after she had passed, actually two weeks after she had passed and we were sitting and friends had come over and there was a conversation about how many packs of cards had she been buried with and someone I think mistakenly mentioned too and
00:20:04
Speaker
he got quite upset because it was very specific. There had to be three packs of cards for mom to be able to play that game even up in heaven. So there was a whole incident around that and I had to come out and reconfirm that we did three packs of cards just so she could have a game out there. She could have her full Brummé game if she wanted.
00:20:25
Speaker
I want to now talk about your grief journey and the tools you use we were talking before we started recording that you started writing in your diary in the process of your mom's you know passing and days
Coping with Loss through Creativity
00:20:42
Speaker
after.
00:20:42
Speaker
And even though you didn't release this book much later, writing then was one of your tools. Can you talk more about all these different tools and also the aspect of spirituality as well of your beliefs and in combination with therapy and all, basically just give it all. The whole thing. Your whole picture. Okay. So I think mom's
00:21:12
Speaker
passing was the first up close and personal passing that I had experienced and given the nature of how she passed, there was no precedent, there was nothing for me to
00:21:25
Speaker
take from anyone else to understand what had happened. And typically in India, when someone passes, the first thing is, is the soul released? Is the soul allowed to transition away from the mortal planes? Is it at peace, right? And because of the nature of a passing, there was a lot of just thought and talk about perhaps the soul was not at peace. So when I first came back to the by, obviously there was the writing and the journey, just trying to make sense of my own ideas and emotions. And then
00:21:55
Speaker
I started going to tarot card readers or psychics just to try and understand, was mom at peace? Where was her soul at? Was she okay? Any messages? I think it was more than any messages for me. I just wanted the reassurance that she was still close to me, which was so counterintuitive to letting the soul go.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then I started going for therapy. I tried holotropic breath work because, you know, when I started to articulate what I had experienced or even write about it, some of the therapists said, you're not getting to the emotion. And I'm like, I thought I'm getting to the emotion, but they were saying not. So I said, okay, nonverbal might be the way to go. So we went for holotropic.
00:22:38
Speaker
um and again it didn't really I didn't have the release that I was seeing other people have so I was like okay something is not quite shifting um and then yoga I've done yoga throughout my young adult life but never a meaningful practice and now I developed a meaningful practice it was literally the minute you step onto the mat you can center yourself take your emotions on a journey but it's also the ability to just allow the thoughts to quieten for a minute to
00:23:07
Speaker
feel what your body is telling you or feel what your heart beats saying to you and just allow the emotion to flow and then when you light on in sabbasana if the tears flow it's okay because it's a safe space so that was that was a that was a whole journey and then i started baking very actively so i picked up baking
00:23:29
Speaker
in London. My daughter was born in November, called Grey, nothing to do, you know. So there's a newspaper called The Daily Mail and on a Sunday they would give a magazine and in the magazine were a couple of recipes and I still remember very clearly there were Nigella Lawson, two recipes for biscuits and I tried those. Oh, I love Nigella. I loved her show. I loved her show. Okay, so go ahead. So I tried those two recipes, got
00:23:58
Speaker
really good feedback and then just went from there so just started baking avidly and then when mom passed, mom had cooked food is a huge thing first party you wake up in the morning was for breakfast at lunch what's for dinner and dinner you're planning next day's menu so it was also a way to be creative to
00:24:18
Speaker
bring some joy back in because when that smell of that cake or whatever I was baking comes in or people eat it or people smile or it's sort of nourishing the soul as well at a certain level and people would say to me your cakes taste nice because you've got stories to tell and I'm like yep
00:24:36
Speaker
all my stories are going into my cakes. Your cake smells nice because you have stories to tell? They would make the cake taste so nice because you have stories to tell because your hands are
00:24:51
Speaker
giving the energy of your stories into whatever you're creating or giving life to in a way, which I thought was a lovely compliment. So baking was a huge, I'd say very therapeutic as well. It would give me purpose in a way, like something to focus on, something to create, something to give joy to
00:25:15
Speaker
get a little bit of light in what was kind of a gray period of life. I would be driving to work in the morning and the sunshine would glint on the windscreen and I'd be like, okay, hi, mom, you're there. It was just finding ways to know she was around me while paying homage to her and her legacy and the food and things we've created and recipes. And it was a whole process.
00:25:45
Speaker
What kind of recipes do you make now or bake or cook that you feel you're paying homage to your mom or that remind you of your
Honoring Mother's Legacy through Cooking
00:25:55
Speaker
mother? I have a notebook that is torn, the spine's gone, the pages are collapsing, the paper's breaking apart, and there are recipes in my mom's handwriting.
00:26:09
Speaker
left now, where we come from, Northern India's got very rich cuisine, very Richmond-like cuisine.
00:26:15
Speaker
So my mother would give me recipes for biryani or chicken cooked with yogurt and saffron or parses we make pan sac. So she would give me which is a mixture of lentils and vegetables and meat cooked together with a particular spice. When it came to desserts, that was not mom's forte as much as it was my maternal grandmother's forte. So, you know, whether it was a Victoria sponge or brownies or lemon cake or even learning how to make lemon curd with my grandmother for lemon tarts.
00:26:45
Speaker
those are really ripe and rich memories. But mom and me in the kitchen was a laugh a minute because she would come in and say, oh, I've made this dish. And I'm like, mom, just stirring the pot does not mean you cooked, you know, I chopped, I prepped, I washed off, you stirred the pot. So we used to banter and joke about it, but I have such happy memories of being in the kitchen with her. This is when you were an adult, correct? Because when you were a child,
00:27:15
Speaker
Well, and it's also culturally you would have someone that would help you in the kitchen and to clean and all that kind of things, right? So these were more things as you as an adult that you developed with your mom.
00:27:30
Speaker
While I was in London and mom would visit. And she would visit. You mentioned regarding as a child, not really having been given the tools to navigate different situations. So for example, when you moved and you were experienced, when you moved from London to look, how do I pronounce again? Luck now. Luck now. Luck now.
00:27:54
Speaker
Were your feelings acknowledged at all of having gone through this big change? Were you ever asked how you felt at all? I don't think that was the period of this emotional parenting that we do today, right? Children were meant to be seen and not heard was pretty much the standard tagline.
00:28:19
Speaker
And I think because it happened so organically, it wasn't a planned move. It wasn't we're going to leave London and move to Luckmount because we're going to Luckmount to visit your grandmother.
00:28:30
Speaker
And then there was a phone call from my paternal grandmother to let my mom know that my father had left his job and was, you know, seeing somebody else as well. Correct. Seen out with someone else. So my mom made the decision to stay on and I don't know if at that point she thought she's never going back. Perhaps that had not, that thought had not germinated at that point, but she knew she didn't want to go back immediately.
00:28:52
Speaker
and also what then subsequently we got to know was mom was expecting my brother when she had arrived she was already expecting my brother so now she was heavily pregnant she had a husband who wasn't exactly behaving yeah present or behaving the way one should so she made the choice to stay on in latin so i don't think it was ever
00:29:13
Speaker
conscious, let's sit far down and tell her what's going on kind of moment. It was just, I guess, making do making decisions based on the information as it was coming to her. I don't recall ever being asked how I felt or
00:29:31
Speaker
the feelings. I don't even know if I articulated the feelings to be fair, you know, like maybe I didn't have the emotional vocabulary to say I feel displaced or I feel abandoned or I feel like I don't fit in. But my maternal grandmother was very, very nurturing and very kind and a really, really strong stabilizing force for me when all of this was in transition.
00:29:57
Speaker
So that would be how I would view that point in time. Now as an adult, then you acquired all these different tools when you were 18, I guess, and moving to London and really finding and coming into your own that you came to be.
Spiritual Practices and Beliefs
00:30:13
Speaker
In that development of who you are,
00:30:16
Speaker
Now, you have your religious background of what you were brought up to become. How do the Parsi beliefs fit into your grief journey as well? Are they part of your journey of the belief of afterlife and so forth? Please, you can share. So although I'm a Parsi by faith, my mother had an altar of Hindu gods.
00:30:47
Speaker
So my mom had given me her altar some years before she passed because an altar is believed to be a boat. So she gave me this altar. So I say my Parsi prayers, and I really hope no one has offended by this. I say my Parsi prayers to this altar with the Hindu God sort of images. So we're slightly confused. But we believe there's something there, right? And the Parsi is, yes, the driving force of the driving ethos of the religion. My grandmother would always say to me,
00:31:16
Speaker
good thoughts good words and good deeds if you can bring your thoughts and control your thoughts and as a child you don't appreciate the strength of that statement but as an adult everything we as we here today in the power of now manifesting your reality of visualization that is all thought and that is all
00:31:37
Speaker
that then drives your reality. So I have really worked hard to, if a negative thought comes up, it's to be able to say actually I'm pressing the pause button, you're going to stay in a different room for now and I'm not going to give life to this negative sort of thought button and reframe what I'm thinking.
00:31:57
Speaker
So spirituality-wise, I'm not ritualistic, but every morning I get up, I say my prayers, and I say my pricey prayers took us all to my mother's giving me, and it's my way of recognizing there's something more than us. Yes, we believe in afterlife, but I also, I read something that I loved that really resonated with me, so
00:32:23
Speaker
Deepak Chopra, and I think I read it or I heard him, I can't remember which, we were talking about, he was talking about dying and afterlife and what happened. And someone said to him, what happens to the soul after we pass on? And he said, if you can think of a room, he said, air is all around us. But when you erect a room and create the four walls, there's air within those four walls, but there's also air around it.
00:32:45
Speaker
if those four walls are taken down the air just mingles with the air outside so he says it's same for the soul and the body when the body goes the soul just goes back to this universe of souls that it's come from so the way he framed it resonated with me and that's like how I want to believe mum is out there so
00:33:08
Speaker
if on my birthday a truck drives up around next to me and it's bright orange in the same color as the Acetex were in India and it's got her name across the side of it, it says Almehir Construction.
Signs and Spiritual Presence
00:33:20
Speaker
I'm like okay mom you're there, I know you're there and that's what I want to believe that she's there all around and sort of present in the ether somewhere with me. So that's kind of what I take from it.
00:33:35
Speaker
I have never heard that description, and I love it, and I can associate with it so much. It's kind of like a bird in a cage, right? It's that, you know, the moment that cage is no longer there, then it just breaks free. Yeah, so I love the description of the air in a room. You mentioned when you saw your mom
00:34:01
Speaker
and you knew she wasn't there anymore. I was also present when my mom passed away, so I can relate to that. Can you share how it was you felt in that moment of seeing her? It was hard. It was hard, and I can see it was hard for you.
00:34:31
Speaker
for anyone who's not been through the process or not been through this, and I don't wish this on anyone at all, but we were in the hospital and means for those that will read the book and I hope you take something from it for yourself. Mum had been in the intensive care unit for 25 days and then the bleeding and then she passed and when she passed, obviously the doctors and the nurses and all the activity around her
00:34:59
Speaker
and then they wanted to wash the body because obviously there had been copious amounts of blood lost and everyone else sort of left and were in the waiting area and I was just sat on a chair and they said you know we need to wash her and I was like can I just sit and can I just see this body of this person who used to be my mother be washed and because you can't
00:35:26
Speaker
You can't absorb the fact that she's no longer there because the body is still there. Maybe she's sleeping. She's going to get up. She's going to talk to me. That sort of final that it's never going to occur again is not something you can comprehend in the moment at all.
00:35:45
Speaker
So it's sort of you're saying goodbye to her. You're stealing your heart. You're sort of logically trying to intellectualize that this is the last time I'm going to see her whilst your emotions are not any when you're ready to accept that thought process. So you're wrestling with that, wanting to
00:36:09
Speaker
sort of break down and bring her back somehow, but you can't, right? That's not how it works. So it's just a sense of allowing yourself to let go or telling yourself to let go because you're not ready to let go. Your heart's not ready to let go, but your head is saying, you've got to let go. This has happened and you've got to find a way to get through this somehow. But yeah,
00:36:39
Speaker
harrowing would be, is what I see on your face as well. For you now, as a mother, and your children were really young at that time, when you're going through different aspects of motherhood, and you don't have any sisters, correct? You have brothers, right? Sorry, you do?
00:37:08
Speaker
I have a younger half-sister.
00:37:10
Speaker
Oh, okay, okay. That's from your, okay, from the, okay. So when you're going through different time periods of your life in which you feel you want a motherly advice in the, especially as you're raising your children, how do you navigate those situations and who do you reach out to or do you connect to your memories and to your mom?
00:37:40
Speaker
It's a really interesting one. So I think I've got a really great group of girlfriends who have been with me through various life circumstances, including the loss of my mother.
00:37:56
Speaker
And if I'm going through a particularly tricky situation, I will call one of them, depending on what the situation is and who I know might have experienced it with their own kids or in their own life.
00:38:11
Speaker
But there's only very few that you will trust to be vulnerable with as well, right? And know that the advice will be something that will work for you and they understand where you're coming from and your perspective. And much as we're citizens of the world, there's something
00:38:29
Speaker
really to be said about friends who have grown up with you either in the same city or the same school or shared life experiences is you don't have to explain yourself, they've got the backstory. So they completely can be with you in that moment where you're at and tell you, okay, either you're projecting or this, have you thought of this, or this is what I've done, this is what my mom did, and help you through it. And my mom had a bunch of
00:38:58
Speaker
means everyone's our best friend. If you go back to, I was in my hometown last month and everyone's like, oh, she was my best friend. And she would change the, yes. And also just the aspect of what is it? She would change the season when she'd enter into a room. That gives me a chance.
00:39:17
Speaker
And so she has a couple of really dear friends who I'm very close to as well and I'll call them. If I'm missing mom terribly, I'll call one of them just to hear their voice and it's that maternal sort of just care. Are you okay? What's happening? And just hearing their voice is soothing regardless of whether I then need advice or not. So that's, and then obviously internal and books and
00:39:42
Speaker
people and you try and do the best you can. As we all are, like you even mentioned, life does not come with a manual, right? Yeah. Somewhere like, okay, what do I do in this situation? You kind of just have to... Chapter three, section five. No, it doesn't. Nope, just go along for the ride. So as we're closing off,
00:40:04
Speaker
Let's share with people how they can now read this memoir. Where can they find this book? How can they get a hold of you, get in touch with you? Please share. Thank you. So the book is available on Amazon and online retailers. So it's called Meher and Me, as Kendra mentioned.
00:40:27
Speaker
There's a website, Farahpress.com, where I love to hear feedback, stories, people can connect with me. We're on Instagram as well, Farah.press. So we're posting about the book and excerpts from the book.
00:40:42
Speaker
And I really look forward to hearing feedback and thoughts. And I hope the story touches people and gives them something for their own life journeys in whichever aspect, because life comes at all of us, you know, whether we want to or whether we're ready or not, it certainly does. Thank you so much for the conversation and allowing me to come on your show. And I really hope the listeners enjoy our conversation and I'd love to hear their thoughts.
00:41:12
Speaker
It was beautiful to read your book because it was very genuine. You weren't just saying all the beautiful things about your mom, which a lot of times we tend to do when someone dies. You were also sharing her flaws, her weaknesses, her humanity, which we all are. And so I appreciate you also coming on the podcast and sharing your own humanity and your own
00:41:39
Speaker
journey as well with us.
Mother's Humor and Personality
00:41:41
Speaker
Is there anything I did not ask you as we close off that you would still like to share with the listeners? No, but I didn't leave your listeners with a taste of my mother's sense of humor. So my mother obviously married twice, right? My father and my stepfather and she would wake up in the morning and my mother was a lawyer and there was a journalist who had come to interview her for some particular article that was writing on lawyers and women in
00:42:06
Speaker
And she said something, asked my mum, you know, a question, I can't remember the question, but my mum was, I wake up every morning and I slept myself twice, once for the first marriage and once for the second marriage. And my stepfather was sitting in the room and going, what the hell are you on a bad kind of thing in our language? Not as politely.
00:42:27
Speaker
But yeah, that was my mother. She was forced to be reckoned with. She was larger than life. And it's an honor to write about her and to honor her legacy. And I think it's about standing up for people regardless of the personal consequences as well and doing the right thing. So I really hope
00:42:49
Speaker
that message can resonate with people. And that is how she died, doing the right thing and standing up for others. That is how she died. And there's honor in that as well in that aspect. I feel proud to be her daughter, to be Meher's daughter. So thank you once again, Farah, for sharing your journey and your mom's story with us. Thank you very much. And thank you so much for having me on the show.
00:43:21
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:43:50
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.