Dealing with Death

It took me quite a while to put this post together. The emotional numbness finally gave way to a more confused state me thinks. Loku amma passed away. And I thought blogging would help me grasp the situation after all this time.

Was floating around in a dream-like state, partly aware that this is not a dream and partly feeling as if I'l wake up from this horrible dream soon. Who laid there in that coffin was not her. It was some random old lady that I did not know. My loku amma was elegant. She never drenched her hair in oil and she never combed it back. Her hair was always a joyful mess and she was so full of life. Neither did she dress in tacky old sarees. She had good taste, was graceful and majestic. Unlike the strange, serious-looking person who lay there surrounded by flowers, looking all limp and dead.

She was a healthy person, had she been sick, we would all have understood. Of course she had the usual pains and aches of the old age, but other than that, she was a bundle of life, doing this, that and everything, bustling about the place with a purpose. Even the morning she passed away, she had been gardening in the morning with loku thaththa after which she had gone to take a bath. It was after the bath that she had been taken on by the wheeze. After trying two inhalers, she herself had walked to the car to go to the hospital and on the way, she had passed away. All this had happened within 10 minutes. A measly ten minutes and ALL the life that this frame contained for all this time had just evaporated in to thin air. And I do not understand how. Because there was SUCH a lot of life in there.

She had even prepared to cook lunch for the two of them that morning. We found a half scraped coconut, peeled and washed onions, chilly and tomatoes on the kitchen counters and two boiled potatoes, all prepped for lunch. Some washed and prepped Dambala from the garden (she rarely buys vegetables from the market, they grow their own, even tomatoes, cabbage, radish and etc in their own garden) alongside a chopping board all set with a hopeful looking knife. Some dry fish too has been washed and was kept separate in another pot, ready to cook. It was as if she walked out of the kitchen for a moment and would resume cooking any moment now.

We would usually go to her place looking forward to a scrumptious meal and being showered with lots and lots of love, attention, laughter and good, happy times. Going there for her funeral was a strange experience, at least for me for I had always associated Loku amma's place with joy, festivity and heaps and heaps of activity, all presided of course, by her. The place bustling with people, as we sat there in a group, I kept expecting her to come smiling towards us in her usual way, her lively voice resonating through the house. But she never came. But I kept expecting her to do so. It was all very strange. It felt like some stranger had died and we were all there to help out. Nothing more.

Not many people would understand the feeling if they had not been there, if they had not experienced it first hand. I have had close people react to me with aggression just because they are sad, yes, you are sad but you should also understand that aggression does not serve a purpose and that nobody is responsible for your grief, it is yours and yours alone. And just because you are sad, the whole world does not have to walk around you on tip toe because they do not know about our loss and neither do they have to know. Neither do they feel what you are going through and they are not to blame either. It took me the death of a close one to understand that death alone has no meaning and while the parting of a loved one is sad, it is the ones who are alive who must be taken care of. Because it is them who suffer more.

Death remains a puzzle but it is evident that death occurs when life leaves the body. Death in itself is not an entity. Death is a state of being. It should only be an adjective, it should not be a noun. You FEEL that once life leaves the body, what remains is just a worthless shell, empty, like a rambutan deprived of its seed or an empty pack of Pringles. The corpse is no longer the person that you used to know. The spirit that this body contained gets liberated. I think we should all be happy that this person is finally free. But as all lay persons do, we have our attachments, our own selfish motives. Isn't it for selfish reasons we weep when a person is dead? Isn't it because we shall miss the physical presence of that person, isn't it because we shall miss what that person used to be for us, used to do for us that we weep? Isn't it because you fear your own loneliness that you weep? If it isn't for selfish reasons that we weep, in this case we should not be sad because it was a relatively painless death. But still I am sad. And that is only because there were things that I wanted to do for her and yet could not manage to do so while she was alive. That is all. While her death did shock me in to numbness sprouting from pure disbelief, I did weep a little out of sheer selfishness because of all the ways in which I would miss her now that she is gone. But then I decided not to be so selfish. While grief remains, Life presents itself to me in a new light now. Take care of the ones who are alive, because once they are gone, there is absolutely nothing that you could do about it. Spend as much time as you can with them, do everything you can for those you care about. Hold no grudges, take no offense, do no wrong to anyone or any living thing. It is these things that matter, not how much you earn or who you hold grudges against, defeating an opponent or proving yourself right everytime. Life is precious and one should savour every moment of it, whether happy or painful. You feel all these things, whether it is grief, happiness, pain or loss because you are alive.

And it took me the death of a loved one to realize all that.