Epitome of Endurance

My mother Smt. Veluvali. Bhramaramba passed away peacefully in her sleep in the early morning of 01-01-2010 at 0630 hours. She has been suffering for the last thirty years with arthritis. She has been on the bed since my father's death in 1976. All these years she guided us like a lighthouse. We were small children when father passed away. I was fifteen years old. I am the eldest of all the children and only son. I have three sisters. All are juniors to me. My father worked in Education Department in Andhra Pradesh. We moved from place to place as and when he was transferred. But when he started suffering from blindness due to long standing diabetic condition, he took a long leave and we began our life in Palakol, a nice place in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. That was in 1975. Within one year my father succumbed to his illness, leaving us behind. We had a house and some ancestral property in Palakol. The house is built to store paddy. It is not livable. We had to do lots of modifications to the house to make it a home. My mother, though not smartly educated in present day sense, made all these modifications possible. She took bold decisions in spite of bitter discouragement from our non-cooperating relatives. We sold our landed properties to build a home by renovating the paddy storages that my grand father had built in 1942. We had to fight for everything. My mother directed my fights, giving me much needed words of courage and understanding. We fought for my father's government pension, for the small amounts of money my father so unwittingly deposited in some banks. We struggled every inch. My mother is very modern in her days. She insisted on educating my sisters. She took great pains to see that her daughters know the basics of all womanly things right from cooking to fine arts. We moved on relentlessly forward. Slowly and steadily all of us are married. All my sisters are well settled. My mother limped on and on. She suffered greatly because of her medical condition. She never lost her enthusiasm and her vision is always towards general well being of each and every one she had ever known. She passed away like a well ripe fruit to her heavenly abode at the age of 81. Till her last breath, she had good vision, good hearing, good sense of humor. She became frail and brittle. Slowly she slipped away from us. I am dedicating my first posing to my mother, she is an epitome of endurance.