Today, we visited Missionaries of
Charity’s (Mother Teresa's organization) Dying Home. It was not what I had expected at all. I expected to see people lying on beds in
their final stages of death. Maybe like
a mass hospice unit or something. What I
did not expect to see was people walking around, including young adults. Some of the people looked far from death
to me, at least in their bodies. Yes,
they were all skinny and somewhat frail looking, but many of them moved around
somewhat swiftly. The death I saw was
not in their bodies, but in their emotions, their eyes, their minds, and their
spirits. They were all completely
lifeless and hopeless. They were empty dead people living in physical shells of bodies.
We walked through the men’s unit first. It was dinner time; the volunteers and nuns were busy preparing
the plates as the men lined up to get them.
When I walked into the women’s unit and saw the women dressed in white gowns with shaved heads squatting on the floor, it seemed like I had walked onto a
scene of the
Bollywood movie, “Water.” The
movie is set in 1938 and it explores the lives of Hindu widows at an ashram in Varanasi,
India. The movie features a seven-year-old
girl, who loses her elderly husband, and in keeping with traditions of
widowhood, she is dressed in a coarse white sari, her head shaven and she is
deposited in an ashram for Hindu widows to spend the rest of her life in
renunciation, cut off forever from her family and society. The movie disturbed me for days afterwards
upon watching it because the widows were so lifeless and without hope as they sat
around waiting to die. The movie moved
me with compassion and deepened my burden for the country of India and the city
of Varanasi.
The caretakers and volunteers at the home were apparently filled with
compassion and love for these dying people. But, I asked myself, “What kind of
love is being demonstrated if it does not produce life, hope and joy in a person’s
life?” For me personally, the love of
God radically changed my life, giving me hope, joy and a future. Today’s visit to the Dying Home was completely different than I
had expected, yet the visit met another expectation: I left that place with a greater burden and compassion for the lost souls of India.
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