Trigger Warning
My mother lost both her parents within a span of six months. My grandmother was the first to pass away, and then my grandfather, who was bedridden for 20 years or more. My grandmother was the one who cared for him the most; the one who saw to his needs and listened to his rants, the one who stayed with him through hell and high water. She kept him alive through all the long years with care and compassion that seemed inexhaustible at times. After she passed away, my grandpa lost his will to live. I was with him the day his anchor to this world passed away.
He sat frozen in his chair, staring blankly at the wall. His halting, ancient voice that laboured to stammer out words was silenced that day. It seemed to me as if his soul had passed away, leaving behind the empty, dried husk that is his body upon this cruel, harsh world. He followed her into the grave not long after.
I never really paid much attention to the concept of one soul in two bodies. Rather, I often mocked it, dismissing it as something too vain and incomprehensible. However, as an effect of being a student of English literature, this theory is something that now I have to study due to which, I now know more about it than I used to. The 17th and 18th-century poets were highly fascinated by it. In their multi-coloured and multi-layered stanzas, they tried to prove that love was the purest and most divine emotion.
They presented logic in favour of these arguments, some of them clearer than the others, while most of them vague. Sadly, these arguments were not enough to silence the critics. They criticised these poems harshly, calling the use of such extended metaphors and overly creative imaginations names such as “pathetic fallacy” and “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together”.
I’m not trying to establish the relationship that my grandpa and grandma had as an example of that theory. I don’t have the ability to understand if they had any love between them or not. But I can tell from what I’ve seen and heard that they both had a lot of will to live. My mom once told me that my grandma used to hint at her unwillingness to embrace death. My grandparents never talked about it openly, but through their actions, their fear of death was blatantly exposed.
This fear of death exists within each one of us. Some of us have it less, some have it more. Some of us always remember death, some of us seldom do, and most of us never think of it except when we face it ourselves. A few days ago, I was reading an article about death in The New Yorker, in which the author writes about near-death experiences. After reading it, thoughts about death started to occur to me.
Have we ever thought of where our death will happen? If not in a sacred place, then where? The author has very subtly injected her thoughts in my neurons. However, to me, death is a huge conflict; it is growing inside me like a huge tree and slowly spreading its branches.
What is death? Is it a supernatural entity that takes away our souls based on the orders of some greater being? Suddenly, the machinations of our body stop in their tracks, and this entity happily strips away from the soul. Do we feel pain when our soul is being pulled out? I don’t know. I used to fear death. But slowly, this fear has grown into hate. To me, this whole process seems like an unnatural and unendurable feeling. However, I did not use to think like this forever. Some events have changed me a lot.
I tried to kill myself twice as a teenager. In my first attempt, I consumed 10 pills, and in my second 50. Death did not take me. Why does this entity hate me so much, I cannot tell. When I tried to seek myself an exit from the ugliness of this world at the very beginning of my life by consuming pills, fate played her games; she loves playing with us. We are but mere ragdolls to her. However, one might lose one’s interest in death after being saved twice.
Things happened, and my fears of death came close to becoming a reality. I cried in muted terror. I started seeing signs of death all around me after losing someone very close to me, and I prayed to God to take away these signs. Ironically, I never had the thought to embrace death for once at that time. However, that thought was still dormant inside me, and every once in a while it reared its head.
Death will conquer all of us at some point. We are not bothered by the fact that we will all fall prey to it as much as we’re bothered by the question of how it will happen. Some of us have a fascination for death, they want a death fit for the saints. They want death in the cradle of nature and ending graced by the touch of the eternal mother.
Poets have often mixed love with death in order to canonise love. Through admiring death, they have tried to give love to a place in heaven. However, not everyone admires death. Many of the authors saw death as the great obstacle, the barrier that kept us away from our loved ones. Everyone sees death in a different light, to each one of us dying has a different meaning.
When a terrible fear has haunted someone constantly for a long time, when fear has absolutely ravaged someone’s psyche with its relentless onslaught, that fear no longer seems as terrible to that person as it was at first. Humans learn to live side by side with the fear, they get used to it. Maybe that is the reason that I do not fear death like before now. But I still cannot stand being near people who are about to die.
I cannot tolerate their suffering and the desperation in their eyes. I do not know why I feel this way. I could not stay with my grandparents in their last moments and I had not been able to accept their death. I did not have the strength to tolerate their final breaths. I never had the courage to sit beside a dying person and see their end before my eyes. My mother remains annoyed because of this weakness of mine.
Most people do not want to die in an accident. They do not see any problem in killing themselves, they are not afraid to give up their soul to that other-worldly being in their sleep, but they cannot think of dying in a car crash or being murdered by someone. They are afraid to die in an inhuman manner; each one of us want our death to be peaceful. I am also afraid of dying in the hands of a murderer, and that fear has grown inside me. If imagining someone’s murder down to the very little detail is something that a sane person would do, then should fantasising about being murdered be called insanity too?
It’s not true that I’ve written this long, vaguely comprehensible piece on death just because I’ve read an article recently. There was a recent trend on Facebook that joked about death; the phrase was something like “Will die one day anyway.” The sheer abundance of these posts has also affected me. People do not think twice before making a joke on a serious matter such as death. I’d really like to ask them if they have any real idea about the inhumanity of the process they are joking about.
I have been fighting a silent war in my mind about death since my childhood. I have been playing this game over and over again. Maybe the reason behind this unsolvable conflict is that death once conquered my brain and body, and showed its ugly face to me. Maybe this entire thing is psychological, and I am running in circles in this mental battleground for no reason at all.