Journey Home to Tim
A devotee’s death in a car accident brings his sister to Mayapur for a moving and unforgettable experience.
By Dr. Nona Carter
“I could imagine Tim walking the streets of Mayapur as easily as I could see him lying prostrate in worship on the marble floor of the temple.”
One year ago today* I got the call:
“Mom, don’t you know it is 6:30 in the morning? Can’t this wait?”
“There was an accident last night. Honey, Tim is gone. He’s gone. Oh my God, he can’t be gone …”
After two hours of eternal hell punctuated only by denial, at 8:45 a.m. on February 1, 2012, the Buffalo police arrived at my parents’ house to deliver the official notice that their youngest child had been killed in a car accident. Although we could not imagine it at the time, my family’s pilgrimage to India and our journey back to Tim began that morning.
Much to the surprise of his thoroughly nonreligious family, in college my brother became a devout member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness movement, more informally known as the Hare Krishnas. Although his spirituality remained foreign to us, with time we learned to respect the selfless, austere and nonmaterialistic lifestyle that his love for Krishna inspired him to lead. When Tim traveled to India a year previous to his death, we all smiled endearingly at his stories of pilgrimage around Govardhan Hill barefoot, sleeping on the marble floors of temples, and staying up all night playing kirtan. Tim lived and breathed to the rhythm of kirtan, a style of devotional music involving the call and response chanting of a mantra. Kirtan was his spiritual sustenance, and while in India he often played and sang all through the night in the twenty-four-hour kirtan hut, where the live music never ends. How interesting, and yet how strange it seemed to my upper-middle-class American family that our little Tim was off doing such bizarre things in India – a place more alien to us than the many-headed deities who reside there.
To read the complete article please click here: https://btg.krishna.com/journey-home-to-tim/