The Room Where She Died

Echoes from “Autobiography of a Yogi,” held together by memory, love, and the persistence of a scar

I can still remember that house, and that room where my mother died, with a clarity that defies the decades. Time usually blurs even our brightest joys, but certain memories remain untouched—as if they belong not to the mind but to the soul.
And in my case, it is the frantic ringing of a bell that comes back first. Sharp. Shrill. Impossible to forget.

It was the wind-up bedside bell my mother rang when she needed help. She always used it gently, almost apologetically, as though she didn’t want to trouble anyone.
That day, it screamed through the house.

Her room had always been out of bounds for me—not by instruction, but by reverence. It felt like a place where the world spoke in whispers. The curtains were half-drawn, the light was dim, and her quiet suffering filled the space in a way that made everything feel sacred and fragile at once.

I rushed in that day with the relatives who had gathered, knowing she didn’t have much time left. Her eyes were already rolling upward, the whites slowly overtaking everything else. Her breathing had become thin, weak, almost transparent.
And then we noticed it: the bell wasn’t being rung by my mother at all.
It was my uncle, desperate and helpless, ringing it nonstop as if anything, anyone, could pull her back.

But it was too late. After two long years of battling an illness that refused to leave, her suffering had finally led her to the threshold she could not step back from. Peace was stepping in where pain had lived.

Much later in life, when I read Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda’s words echoed somewhere deep inside me:
Death is not an ending, but a doorway between rooms.

Only then did I understand why that moment stayed etched in me. I had watched her step through her doorway. And for a child who loved her deeply, it felt as if the earth itself had shifted.

We moved away from that house a few months after she died. I was ten years old. Grief at that age is not articulate—it sits in strange corners of the mind.

Later, when my father allowed me to cycle to school instead of taking the bus, I often pedalled past the old house. My friends would chatter beside me, laughing and arguing about schoolboy things, but whenever we approached that lane, something inside me grew quiet.

Someone else lived there by then, but to me it would always remain her house—where she fought, where she faded, where she was last alive.

In my childish imagination, I often promised myself that one day, when I made enough money, I would buy that house. As if owning it could somehow protect the memory that lived inside it.
But life, as always, had other plans.

Years later, after joining my father’s business, my motorcycle became my constant companion as I rode around the city—eager, restless, full of young blood—meeting architects, engineers, consultants.
One afternoon, I happened to pass that old house again.

A signboard hung outside:
It was now an architect’s office.

Normally, I might not have bothered walking in to meet a lesser-known architect. But this wasn’t a normal moment. This was a window opening into a part of my life I had not stepped into since childhood.

I walked in. The house was almost the same, except for the fresh wall colours. Yet it felt smaller.
Childhood has a way of stretching space and expanding walls to fit the size of our emotions in ways adulthood cannot.

I told the receptionist I wanted to meet the architect. When she gestured for me to enter, my feet slowed down at the doorway of the very room where my mother had died.

The architect probably thought I was simply being polite. He couldn’t have known the weight behind each step.
His desk stood exactly where my mother’s bed once had been.
And he sat almost precisely where she had taken her final breath.

For a moment, I thought about telling him. The words rose but never left my mouth.
Not every truth needs to be spoken. Some memories are too delicate to hand over to strangers.

I left the house with a heaviness in my chest, as though I had stepped out of that room for the second time in my life.

The house has since been demolished. A commercial building stands in its place now—glass and concrete where once my world had collapsed.
But even today, whenever I pass that road, a faint tug of remembrance finds me. Not painful. Not raw. Just a quiet acknowledgement that this land once held something sacred for me.

Some years later, I came across Stephen King’s words:

“Writers remember everything… especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one.
From the big ones you get novels…
Art consists of the persistence of memory.”

Back then, as a boy, I only saw loss.
I didn’t yet understand anything beyond the pain.
It took years—and an older heart—to see the doorway behind it.

Only then did I understand why this memory remained untouched by time:
because some moments become the very shape of who we are.
Some scars don’t fade because they’re not wounds—
they’re reminders of love that refused to disappear.

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Author’s Note:

Some stories stay with us not because they hurt,
but because they once held everything we loved.
And though time may change the walls and doors,
some rooms—especially the ones built in the heart—
remain exactly as we left them.