“In life, periods of solitude were blessings. Dying alone was a bitter curse. “
The idea of a body that has been stripped off all the life, sensations, feelings, emotions, and imperfections is harrowing. However, a day would come in the future when it will be true for me and everyone else. Everything that has an entry must have an exit, everything that starts must end. Forever is an illusion, beautiful and painful at the same time. The flimsy being is laid naked and bare for the final time.
Life or living is like reading and writing two books at the same time. We carve our own stories, adventures, and events and we interpret each character, moment, and relationship differently. As time passes and we experience more, a certain obsession fills our mind and being alive feels like skidding in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out before we say ‘yay’ to the next escapade. However, suddenly, we are thrown out of course before the next adventure begins or in the middle of an adventure. We are forcibly done with it!
The biological aspect of death is simple – we are either burned and reduced to ash or buried under the ground where we soil and decompose. What follows is a scary and almost brutal intrusion of our private affairs and belongings. People going through our stuff, reading our private diaries, holding that gift that was given to us by that special someone, cleaning our wardrobe and making room for their clothes, changing our favourite bedsheets, rearranging the interiors of our room, and a hundred different other things which we can’t control or prevent. There is no story you can convey about the things people find. All our convictions, positions, and dispositions are lost.
Dying also defies our most inherent quality – curiosity. We would miss out on so much that actually happens and so much that happens only in our heads. We would miss eating in that new restaurant, attending that family function, binge watching that amazing TV show, going for that road trip with friends reliving the college days, reading that new book of our favourite writer and other countless things that bring us joy. The future will not belong to us. We would just dwell in the memories.
The thing about dying is that it does not matter, how much we plan it, it is always unplanned. Those last fleeting moments when our breath is about to give up, our heart stops to beat, our brain gives up on producing new cells and our eyes begin to close, everyone and everything fade away. We are not up for a roll call remembering everyone close to us or every significant thing we ever did. In those final moments, we feel alone even if we are surrounded by everyone we ever encountered. It is eerily similar to being stranded in a party where we don’t connect with the people and the only choice we have is to walk out. However, death doesn’t present us with that choice. We are bound to stay and stay there for forever!
We are born with zero expectations and as we traverse and find ourselves in this amazing journey called life, expectations brew in our heads. They are a great cause of pain and distress, make us suffer and embroil us in a never-ending and poisonous labyrinth of hurt and grief. However, we die with zero expectations and that alone can promise life after death to be peaceful. We rest in peace – the only emotion that is so hard to feel and experience when alive.