Last week, the news of a passing came crushing. First, it made me numb. There were no tears. I kept seeing the film that I was seeing. Then, I saw the next film. Then, the next. I went to bed only after I had completely exhausted my brain and my heart of any capacity to think, reason or mourn. Early next morning, I woke up to a phone call that inquired why I had called. I replied in the negative, assuring the caller that there was nothing to worry. When I had said that, I actually meant it because I didn’t remember the night. After cutting the phone, I turned to my side, trying to sleep again, when the floodgate of realization forced its way in. The death hit me.
I frantically returned the call. She knew from my voice. I passed on the news and we both sunk into a new level of numbness together. It was one of those times when I felt like punching God in the face. Death takes one on a strange spiritual journey. Beliefs are questioned, and rightly so. Questions multiplied in the face of the illogical cruelty of it all. When prayers go unanswered and when questions draw a void of reason, death teaches us that in the end, belief is nothing but self-reliance.
Every time the news of death comes knocking, and if the departed is close enough, the body goes through a surreal shock that is as intense emotionally as it is physically. The pace of breathing changes, heartbeats gallop, there is sudden dryness in the throat, one gets goose bumps of anxiety. These symptoms are sudden and simultaneous, sometimes non decipherable even, because at the same instant the mind is racing in memories of someone who was alive last we knew. Death boxes up human life into the realm of memories and regrets with a cruel finality.
Death is a precondition of life; if we were not to die, how would we call ourselves alive? Death teaches us to stop taking things for granted. Death also makes the wise reckless in a sense. It emboldens us to say what we want without fear of being ridiculed. It makes us brave to express emotions wholeheartedly without shame because what use are bottled up emotions of love, gratitude, anger or sorrow after the precursor of those emotions is gone for good? If anything else, death teaches us to live.
The news also brings us face to face with our emotional cowardice in terms of offering condolence. Showing up for the bereaved requires gargantuan proportions of strength. Each loss is individual, we doubt that the kind of loss we are feeling can in no way match the loss they are feeling. Many of us we feel infinitesimally small and weak in expressing our grief. The thing that plods to me through now is the acceptance that there is no proper way to grieve, or to express it. There is absolutely no question of comparing one’s sense of grief with anyone else’s.
Regret soon follows the news. “Could I have done this instead? Should I have called? Why did I not say what I meant? What sort of punishment is this? What did I do to deserve it?” Death is too big and too important a part of mortal existence to even bother with providing the answers. It doesn’t care about anything once its job is done. The first step to healing is to consciously stop battling the questions that pain. Regret and guilt are counterproductive and most useless when dealing with such a permanent loss.
As time heals, the reliance on “What ifs?” eases out. I cannot imagine how life were to be if some people were still around. Some things are not meant to be. The sooner you accept the losses that God orders, the easier it is to discover his hidden scheme of things. If you give her a chance, and if you are open to seek, life does have the potential to make up for one profound loss by infinite, disguised, daily gifts.
It took days to sum up courage to make that call. It was in my interest and theirs because the grieving need their space. But, not too much. There is a time and period to grieve wholeheartedly, and then there is a time to move on. Agreed, this window is different for all individuals, it is our duty to keep death behind us, and move on at the first possible sign our heart gives us. Moving on is not a sign of forgetting, or not caring, or not being hurt enough in the first place. Moving on is paying respect to life. Moving on is also the only way to defy death.
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
An excerpt from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
