What remains when the body, personality and roles through which we know one another change?
Their departure was sudden.
The way it happened left the entire family in shock.
There was no time to prepare for the silence that followed, to say everything we carried in our hearts, or to finish the ordinary moments we had assumed would always be waiting for us.
Before we had fully understood that they were gone, we found ourselves standing before the fire, witnessing the cremation of the bodies through which we had known them.
We were right there.
We could see the flames.
We could feel the heat.
And yet there was no response.
No voice.
No movement.
No reaction.
The bodies were there, but the people we knew through those bodies were no longer responding to what was happening.
I remember how strange it felt to witness this.
We had spent our entire lives knowing one another through the body, the voice, the expressions, the habits, the personality, the roles we played, and the samskaras we carried.
And suddenly, we were seeing something we had never truly seen before:
The body could be there, and yet the person we knew through it was no longer accessible to us in the way we had known them.
Perhaps, for the first time, we were tasting what it might mean to experience ourselves as something other than the body.
We had forgotten that we were not our body.
We called them Dad and Mom.
We remembered Dad through the many roles he had lived—first as a marine engineer in the Merchant Navy, later in executive leadership, and eventually through his own business serving ships.
We remembered him through his strength, his unconventional nature, his way of doing things, and the identity he had built through a lifetime of work and responsibility.
We remembered Mom through her gentleness, her compassion and kindness, and the way she kept holding Dad’s hand and walking beside him.
These are the ways we knew them.
These are the memories we carry.
But beneath everything we remember, a question began to arise in me:
What remains?
We often say, “This is who he was.”
We identify someone through their personality, their behavior, their memories and their patterns.
We may even call these patterns our samskaras.
But what if these too are simply patterns we carry through this particular expression of life?
What remains when we are able to witness them without becoming them?
What remains when the body, the personality and the roles through which we knew someone are no longer there?
I don’t know that I have an answer.
But the question itself has changed something in me.
Perhaps the body is the temple in which we reside for a while—not the entirety of who we are.
Perhaps our personalities, our roles, our identities and even the samskaras through which we experience this life are expressions we take on for a time.
And perhaps death makes visible what we so easily forget while we are alive:
We are more than the body, even though the body is how we meet one another in this life.
Dad had always chosen unconventional ways of being.
I began to wonder whether there was something in the unconventional way he left that was inviting each of us to question what we believe about God, life and death.
I cannot know that with certainty.
But I can receive it as an invitation to reflect.
Dad had lived much of his life through the identity of a man shaped by a life at sea, service, responsibility and work.
His strength, discipline and toughness were qualities we readily saw in him.
But perhaps there was another quality beneath that outer strength—a quieter, more tender form of the masculine. A capacity to love, protect and care that did not always announce itself.
And Mom, in her own way, carried a different expression of that same wholeness.
Beneath her soft and fragile exterior was a profound kindness, compassion and capacity to love.
Strength and softness.
The masculine and the feminine.
Shiva and Shakti.
Perhaps these are not simply qualities we see in others.
Perhaps they are both aspects of each one of us.
Perhaps we spend much of our lives becoming identified with one side or the other, forgetting that both already live within us.
And perhaps every role we take on—father, mother, daughter, son, husband, wife, professional, caretaker, the strong one, the sensitive one—is simply a way life expresses itself through this temporary body.
So what if we stopped asking only,
“Who was this person?”
and began asking,
“What was beneath the person I thought I knew?”
A man or woman.
Young or old.
Child or elder.
The body changes.
The personality changes.
Our roles change.
But perhaps the spirit has no age.
Perhaps it has no time.
And perhaps the deepest inheritance they have left us is not a collection of memories—not even the good ones or the difficult ones.
It is the opportunity to look beneath all of them.
To discover the essence of love that remains.
We continued our prayers.
We followed the rituals.
We did everything we knew to do.
And yet, somewhere along the way, perhaps we had forgotten our real wealth.
Love.
We thought our wealth was in the people we loved, the memories we created and the lives we built.
But perhaps those relationships were also pointing us toward something deeper:
the capacity to love that they awakened in us.
That is what I feel they are reminding us of.
“We are still here with you.”
Perhaps this does not mean that we can access them in the way we once did.
We cannot hear their voices.
We cannot hold their hands.
We cannot sit beside them.
But perhaps their presence has become an invitation rather than an identity.
An invitation to remember.
To remember who we are beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond the intellect.
To remember that every moment, while we are still here in these bodies, we have a choice.
And so, with humility, I bow to each of you.
Please allow me to touch your divine feet—not merely as a gesture of respect, but as an acknowledgment of the divine presence I recognize within each of you.
I bow to the love, the awareness, the essence that exists beneath every body, every personality and every role.
And I honor the love you have showered upon us and continue to shower upon us.
That love is what I want to remember.
Not simply who we were to one another,
but what we awakened in one another.
I know there are many questions that remain in our loving hearts.
Questions about why.
Questions about how.
Questions about their physical absence.
I may never have answers to all of them.
And perhaps I don’t need to.
Perhaps the greater question is:
What will we choose to do with the life that remains?
How will we live?
What will we remember?
Will we continue to identify ourselves only through our personalities, our roles, our stories and our samskaras?
Or will we sometimes pause and ask:
Who am I beneath all of this?
That question does not need a final answer.
Perhaps simply asking it creates a space—a space between who we have been and how we choose to live now.
That is the possibility they leave with us.
The choice is ours.
We can carry their memory only as an absence, or allow it to remind us of the love that remains within us.
We can remain bound to our roles and stories, or meet them with greater freedom.
We can let grief separate us from life, or allow it to deepen our participation in life.
Whatever we choose, may we remember that love is still available—not as a denial of grief, but as a way of carrying it.
We are still here.
We still have a choice.
And perhaps that is the greatest blessing we can leave one another with.
Speak what matters while there is still time.
See one another beyond our roles and patterns.
And while you are still in the body,
live from the love that you are.
Remember us not only as we were, but through the love we awakened in you.
When the questions return, may we meet them with patience.
May grief and hope exist together.
May we trust that even in the presence of absence, something meaningful can still be carried forward.
We are here with you, always.
