The Avatar of Love
The author, Richard Margolin, wrote this article for our publication, based on a talk given by him at the Silent Retreat in New York in October 1993.
( Part 1 | Part 2 )
During the summer of ’92 my father left for the Virgin Islands to visit his brother who was then dying of cancer. When my father returned, his complexion had become quite yellowish and the whites of his eyes had become almost the color of asparagus. We thought at that time that he had contracted hepatitis while he was away, an initially that is what the tests shewed. But he continued to be gravely concerned about ether symptoms he was experiencing as well, such as extreme weight loss and acute fatigue. So, he was admitted to West Jersey Hospital (one of N.J.’s better hospitals) for a battery of tests. This time the hepatitis proved negative. But, while the doctors were nearly 100% certain that there was no cancer, the tests also showed the valve in my father’s liver was not dilating properly and this was what was causing the jaundice. The diagnosis was ‘liver disease’. Perhaps due to an overdose of Vitamin A over a prolonged period of time. There also were other theories, but none were ever confirmed.
We were also told that while my father’s condition was quite serious, there are people who had lived quite normal lives with limited liver function. But he must be very careful; severely restricting his diet, monitoring his bleed pressure, etc.
This was toward the end of August. Around mid-September I received a call from my mother while I was vacationing in the Catskills. She had just taken my father back to the hospital because he had been vomiting bleed and was so groggy that he could barely walk and he was new in a coma. It was late at night, se I packed my things and left the next morning. On the way down (my mother lives in Cherry Hill, NJ) I stopped off at my apartment in Hoboken to pick up some odds and ends. While doing so I placed a plastic bag of vibhuti in front of a picture of Baba that I keep on a stand next to my kitchen. When I went back to pick it up, after only a few moments, I noticed that it was quite warm. I remembered Lorenzo saying that when he took down Baba’s chair after the meetings on Monday or Thursday nights that the chair was often very hot. So, I took this as a somewhat auspicious sign.
When I arrived in Cherry Hill my mother and I waited for my sister, Cynthia, to also come down from New York and the three of us left for the hospital. My father was in the emergency ward. When I entered the room and saw this skeletal creature with the tubes running up his nostrils my first impression was that he was already dead. He was completely immobile, except for very, very slight traces of respiration. It was quite apparent that the only thing keeping him alive was the apparatus that he was on, which was attempting to detoxify the chemicals that were building up in his liver now that his liver no longer could do the work.
Even so, the doctors told us that there was only a 50/50, or perhaps 60/40 possibility of his coming out of this coma and even if he did, that this would recur some time down the road.
We spent a good part of the afternoon with him and then my sister, who has three small children, finally had to get back home. My mother and I stayed on.
After a while I took out the vibhuti, and, though he was almost completely unconscious, I felt obliged to ask him if he wished for me to rub some vibhuti on his forehead (my father did not believe in Sai Baba at all). To my utter amazement, he nodded yes! I looked at my mother to see if she had just witnessed the same thing I had, and she said she had.
I then proceeded to rub the vibhuti on his head. The fragrance filled the entire area. One could smell it 10-15 feet away. This was the same vibhuti I used every day and I had never smelled it at all. My mother looked at me and asked if they perfumed it before selling it. I said no.
The next morning, he was wide awake, and he got so much better over the next few days that I thought that I could return home. But on Sunday morning, when I was planning to leave, a nurse from the hospital called and requested us to come to the hospital. One of the doctors wanted to speak to us. When he arrived, he said that my father’s liver had stopped taking a certain hormone out of the bloodstream, and when this occurs, the kidneys inevitably fail and in his entire career only one person had survived it. He was a man in his 30’s. My father was 72, so the doctor said my father didn’t have much time left; may be a couple of days and I knew at the time he was being generous.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell my father he only had a little while to live, he was struggling so hard by now to take every breath. This time he consciously allowed me to rub vibhuti on his back, while my mother and a rather dumbfounded nurse looked on. Another extraordinary but altogether different phenomenon then occurred. Almost immediately after I started to rub the vibhuti on his back, my entire state of mind underwent a complete metamorphosis. The transformation was so rapid that I was at first taken aback. I thought to myself, “wait a minute, this is supposed to be for him, not me.” I just kept on getting happier, more cheerful, stronger and more optimistic by the second. It was one of the most incredible and most obvious of `Baba’s leelas I’ve ever experienced. At the time, I, of course, thought he was giving me a sign that my father was about to be cured. Later I realized that he was just protecting and insulating me from the inevitable.
~To be continued in the next issue~
( Part 1 | Part 2 )
