Swarupa das: Last Saturday night I went to the ER with high fevers and cellulitis (swelling and redness due to infection in the blood). I was admitted and finally got to my room early Sunday morning. I was feeling pretty out of it most of Sunday and then the fevers began to subside as the I-V antibiotics began doing their magic. By Monday morning my head began to clear and I was only running a low grade fever. My wife brought my laptop in so I could get on the Internet, check emails, etc. while I was there.
In Dominican Hospital you get your own room but one wall is solid and the other has a partition separating you from your next door neighbor. Having become more aware of what was going on around me Monday I noticed that the person who was my neighbor was having a hard time breathing. At times it sounded like he was gasping for breath. I figured maybe he had asthma or pneumonia. Anyway – Monday evening I sat up in my bed and began tapping out a beat on the little rolling table in the room as if it were a mrdanga. I began chanting some bhajans and then had a soft kirtan that went on for hours.
I wasn’t able to get much sleep Monday night and besides – in the hospital they’re always coming in to take your vitals, change the I-V medication or to fix some occlusion in the I-V line so sleeping is a rare commodity there. I continued my chanting of japa and bhajans through the night and figured that if my neighbor was being disturbed he would have told a nurse to ask me to lower my voice.
Tuesday morning arrived and after a small breakfast I started up once again – this time chanting Brahma Samhita verses as well as the Hare Krishna mantra. Before long there was a knock on my door. It was a middle aged woman who told me she was the daughter of the old man who was my next door neighbor. I thought she was going to complain about my chanting.
She said, “My father was your neighbor. He just died five minutes ago. He was 81 and was very sick. We knew he was going to die and so the family has just been waiting for it to happen. He was conscious right up until an hour before his last breath but he hasn’t communicated with any of us for days. This morning when we came into the room he was smiling and pointing to the partition saying ‘the man is singing, the man is singing.” Then I heard you. We were all – myself, my mother and brother and my father – listening to you sing and that’s when he passed away.“
Well, you can imagine what I was thinking and feeling at that point. I was speechless. I just listened as she continued saying, "I don’t know what you were singing but my father was a native American Indian and we thought that maybe you were doing some kind of native chanting but whatever it was my father obviously heard you and it gave him some comfort and happiness during his last few hours on Earth.”
I began to explain, “Well it wasn’t exactly native American Indian … it was …” but she interrupted me saying, “Whatever it was — it just seemed so right. My mother and brother are in there with my father and they’re allowing us some time with him before they remove his body from the room so I’m going back inside to join them, but we just wanted to thank you and tell you that we appreciate it so much — your singing; IT JUST SEEMED ….. SO RIGHT.”
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