Our mother, Mrs. Saroja Sundaram, passed away at the Ottawa Heart Institute in Ottawa, Canada on the 21st of May 2018 at the age of 84 after a brief and unexpected illness. Amma was raised in Thiruvananthapuram and spent a few decades in Delhi after she got married. After the sudden passing away of our father and her beloved husband, Amma moved to North America and spent two decades in the U.S. and Canada. She missed her life in India but she never let it show, adjusting and adapting to this new world and making friends with people of various faiths and ethnicities. Amma never lost her childlike enthusiasm and her sense of wonderment at anything new and different. She was free of bigotry and prejudice and believed that people and families the world over were essentially the same. She had a beautiful voice, a wonderful talent for Carnatic music and extraordinary culinary skills. She was always elegant, dignified, simple and well turned out. She was extremely intelligent and well-informed, a voracious reader and an avid solver of word puzzles. Amma was, above all, a soft, kind and exceptionally selfless and generous person who always placed her own interests and comforts last. Her granddaughter Akhila was the apple of her eye and there was nothing that she treasured more than being with her. Akhila too loved her soft and indulgent Appamma immeasurably and misses and shall forever miss her kindness and gentleness and warmth. Amma is survived by her brothers Mr. P. V. Iyer and Mr. P. G. S. Mony, her brothers-in-law Mr. P. N. Balagopal and Mr. P. N. Viswanathan, her sisters-in-law Mrs. Bhagavathy Ramaswamy, Mrs. Kamala Viswanathan and Mrs. Lalitha Mony, her daughter Jaya and son Ravi, her daughter-in-law Shubha, her granddaughter Akhila, and many loving nieces, nephews, relatives and friends from all over the world. All of us miss Amma’s benign presence and aura. Her passing away has left an immense void in our hearts and our lives that can never be filled.