Death

I got introduced to death when I was 7 when one of our neighbors died in an accident. In those days, I didn’t understand what death was or I must say death was scary. The body was draped in a white cloth and people played Parai (a kind of drum that is played when someone dies, called a Parai in Tamil) and paraded towards the funeral home. I was so scared to see that that I hid myself behind my Mother. My mother used to say that the dogs can see Yama coming and they tell us by howling (and crying – dogs cry too) in the night. Incidentally, for a week before this man died, dogs in my street were howling and crying. So, I was shit scared after that I dreaded sleeping alone in my house. I was 10, when one of my friend’s brothers was killed in an accident. I started to understand death. Especially, the look on his father’s face when my father and I went to his house to convey our condolences is still in my memory. After that, lot of deaths have crossed my path – from a 10 month old baby to a 80 year old grandmother, from a friend, who drank a pesticide to kill himself to a friend who drowned in a nearby pond, death came in different sizes, but that fitted all. But, all of them , just crossed me as another day in my life before something which turned my world upside down. One of my sisters, died in 2008. Death pained. It still does. I started feeling the pain of others who have gone through this. To get through that, I spoke with one of my closest friends, Vikram. The reason is that he has seen his father and mother die in a short span of time, when he was 17 and for that age, I felt he handled it much better than any of the elders I have seen do. So, naturally I talked to him and he said couple of things that still ring in my ears – He spoke of forests where the forest continuously reinvents itself. He said, death is part of the nature’s design to get the new. Without death, we will not get anything new and there is a reason for everything. I dint quite understand that, but it still stuck a chord with me. Two months after that, Vikram died in an accident. I didn’t understand the nature’s design even then.  I don’t know what nature was thinking when it took both of them. But as Vikram said, it had a design in mind, probably. After that, I started accepting death as part of my day to day life. If we think about it, from the day we are born, we are trying to chase death and move closer and closer to death before we succeed one day. We live to die and for nothing else. If we understand that, we can make most of our decisions in life with a clear head and be objective most of the times. When I hear my coworkers cringe about someone else getting a promotion and not them, when someone else gets an onsite opportunity instead of them, I just ask them to think about how big or small is that when compared to our lives. Is it big enough to trouble us a life time? Or would we be better of moving to better things accepting that nature has a design for us? How many of us think that “he died already, I still didn’t?” why compare only when things go wrong for you or someone gets a promotion instead of you? I get stares for those explanations, but I am sure someday they will come to an understanding as I did. Most of the times in my life, it is this understanding that guided me. That’s why, I was able to move on from people who cheated me, move on from something that didn’t do any good to me etc. I think God’s biggest success lies in keeping the secret of death with him. We don’t know what we will do after we die; we don’t know what to expect; and therein lies his biggest victory. As Steve Jobs said once, if we start living our day as if it is going to be our last, we won’t regret a day in our life and (won't) do things that will make us unhappy.