To restrain my emotions before your open casket was hard enough, and your son I just met said, “Mom loved you dearly. Always talked about you.” Then, “Your gift, that scarf from India? Her favorite.” Wrapped around your neck, the blue-and-black silk matched your dress.

Ted gave me your email address after I had disclosed yet another diagnosis. “So we’d stop bugging him,” you said. I couldn’t respond. He was my project lead, your husband.

“Peas of the same pod,” Ted said of you and me whenever I complained of overwork, citing debilitating symptoms; symptoms I powered through, driven. “He’s clueless,” you said. But it wasn’t just him. When coworkers remarked, You look good, my invisible pain winced. I thanked them; smiled, even.

Your thirty-year marriage, like us, looked perfect on the outside. My traumatic seventeen-year marriage ended. “The trauma resulted in your autoimmune disease,” you said, echoing my rheumatologist, and added, “You’re lucky to have found a good rheum.”

And your gibes about your endo…I laughed aloud reading your emails even when I was writhing in pain on sleepless nights. About the bunch of varying symptoms that flared up every day, relentless, you always said, “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”

“That’s your quote,” I joked. But it was our truth, like a shared secret no one else could know.

How eerie, our identical diagnoses, the vicious cycles of inflammation, pain, fatigue, stress. The invisibility of it all, those normal reports from our diagnostic tests and procedures, that it’s-all-in-your-head-look most providers gave us—everything that made us scream. A soundless scream no one else could hear.

You and I, so alike. Snapping your picture would’ve transformed into my selfie; a photo taken without tapping on my iPhone’s rotation icon for the front-facing camera. A resemblance in the image no one else could see.

What if everyone could believe our hidden truth? What if everyone could hear our silent scream? What if everyone could see our invisible agony?

Surrounded by your family, you wrote in your last email to me, Talking with you, I don’t feel so alone. I choked. Shouldn’t I have been the one to say that to you, all along?

You lifted me up when signs of despair threatened me. If I was Ted’s right hand at the workplace, you were a crutch in my healing journey.

Your daughter-in-law sauntered toward me now and asked if I noticed the scarf. That piece of silk was a small gift from India for you, nothing great. But it was one I had diligently selected from hundreds of scarves in the mall, pushing away the gaudy-colored ones, too-busy-print ones. I wanted something elegant for you.

As though you wearing that scarf today wasn’t enough of an honor, your son wanted me to speak. Eulogy? I wasn’t prepared. You would’ve said, Go ahead, do it.

So I spoke of meeting you for the first time: today. Of illnesses and distance and the pandemic thwarting our plans to meet. Of our decade-long virtual friendship—golden, like the meaning of our names, Aurelia and Swarna.

I couldn’t use the past tense for you, and if that surprised anyone, I wouldn’t know. Everyone—your family, your friends, my coworkers—blurred into one entity, and faded away until they became invisible to me. All, except your serene face in the casket.

“Aurelia,” I said, “you’re the only one I know who has walked in my shoes. And not just a mile. But for miles and miles. Tirelessly.”
And now you’re gone. But I’d trudge along. One pea clinging to the pod.

Shanti Chandrasekhar has formerly held IT corporate professional titles such as project manager, project engineer, technical writer/editor, yet has always been a writer. Disabling health conditions, including an autoimmune disease, caused her to leave the workforce. Her writing (fiction and nonfiction) is forthcoming or has appeared in The Gravity of the Thing, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She writes and lives in Maryland.