The Song She Sang Before Surgery

Some people face fear by calming everyone else first.

Most people being wheeled into brain surgery are expected to look frightened.

My mother began singing instead.

Not loudly.
Not dramatically.

Just softly… with a peaceful smile on her face.

The people around her — my father, uncle, aunt, even the nurses who had grown fond of her during her long stay in the hospital… were the anxious ones.

She was the calmest person in the corridor.

Years later, that image still stays with me.

Not only because of the surgery.

But because that was exactly who my mother had always been.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself listening very carefully to people talking about her.

Whenever such conversations happen, I pay attention in a way that is probably difficult to explain to anyone who has lost someone deeply woven into their life.

Every memory feels important.

Every detail feels worth preserving.

And during that conversation, someone smiled and said something that instantly sounded familiar.

“Your mother was always very clear about everything.”

That was true.

My mother was not someone who minced words.

There was clarity even in the smallest things.

Not harshness.

Not cruelty.

Just clarity.

And perhaps life had trained her early for that role.

She had lost her parents young and, as the eldest among the siblings, slowly became the centre around which the family organised itself.

Responsibilities arrived before youth had fully finished.

She helped raise her younger siblings.
Guided them.
Protected them.
Pushed them.
Worried about them.

She eventually saw both her younger sisters married, and later her youngest brother too.

Long before people spoke casually about “strong women,” she was already quietly living the job description.

Not for recognition.

Simply because someone had to.

At one stage of her life, she was living in Calcutta and working as a teacher when she met my father, fell in love, and got married.

But even after marriage, that same instinct remained.

Family first.

Always.

It was less a decision and more a permanent setting of the heart.

As I listened to these old memories being shared, another story resurfaced.

One I had heard before.

But somehow, this time, it stayed with me differently.

It was about the day she was taken into surgery for her brain tumour.

At that time, I was away at boarding school in Kottayam.

This was the late 1960s.

Long before mobile phones, video calls, instant updates, or even the comfort of hearing someone’s voice whenever fear became unbearable.

Information travelled slowly then.

And children studying away from home often lived inside long stretches of uncertainty without fully understanding the seriousness of what was unfolding elsewhere.

While my mother spent months in a faraway hospital preparing for brain surgery, I was carrying an entirely different sadness of my own — the lonely ache of hostel life, distance from home, and the quiet feeling that life was happening somewhere else without me.

I knew my mother was unwell.

But I don’t think I truly understood the scale of what she was facing.

Perhaps children rarely do.

Not because they do not care.

But because adulthood has not yet taught them how fragile life can suddenly become.

My father, uncle, and aunt were there with her in the hospital.

Naturally, everyone around her was anxious.

That is usually how such moments work.

Hospitals have a way of making even optimistic people speak softly.

Even hope begins walking carefully in those corridors.

And when the time finally came for her to be wheeled into the operation theatre, everyone expected what people normally expect in such moments.

Fear.

Nervousness.

Silence.

But my mother, lying on that hospital bed, did something none of them ever forgot.

She began singing.

Softly.

Calmly.

With a peaceful smile on her face.

It was a prayer song based on the Biblical words comparing human life to grass — fragile, brief, passing.

“As for man, his days are like grass…”

A reminder of how temporary life is.

And yet, strangely, how eternal faith can feel beside it.

What moves me most when I think about that moment is this:

She was the one being taken into brain surgery.

And yet somehow…

she became the person comforting everyone else.

And as she was being wheeled away, singing gently with that brave smile, it was almost as if she was trying to ease the fear of the people walking beside her.

I think true strength often looks different from what we imagine.

It is not always loud.

Not always dramatic.

Sometimes it is simply the ability to carry your own fear quietly enough that others feel safer beside you.

Even now, when I hear people describe my mother as strong, my mind does not first go to sacrifice or responsibility or discipline.

It goes to that hospital corridor.

To that prayer song.

To that calm smile.

And to a woman being taken toward uncertainty…

while still trying to leave courage behind for everyone else.