Reader Alert - If you feel queasy about the notion of discussing death please do not proceed beyond this point !
The fear of Divine Death
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
- John Donne
Termination of all biological functions. That is how Death is defined. It is not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that you look forward to. Instead you are hurtling towards it on the train of time. A train that cannot stop. Stop so that you may admire life but learn to savor it as it passes you by. And in that treatment it is uniform to all. Everyone is aboard the same vehicle. All perceived superiority helping as differentiators come to a grinding halt when you meet death. It looks at everyone with the same cold impassioned vision and your wealth; educational indexes are rendered to the dustbins of life.
Death is the climax of our life. It is the endgame that no one is keen to reach. We are scared of the nothingness beyond. It was a lazy Sunday when I began thinking about what frightens us about this nothingness and why our life revolves around preventing ourselves from derailing in life and meeting it too early. And what does happen after you meet it.
Robin Sharma elucidated on life before death and talked about how to do your best before you die in his book on “Who will cry when you die “. So that you are remembered for it .He tells you about a life that ends before you know if you while away and reach a point of looking back with regret over a lifetime wasted. So he recommends you to realize your potential to the fullest, to seize the opportunity to do well unto yourself and those around you. What is the legacy that you leave behind?
I thought it could be interesting to reach beyond this barrier of end of your time, turnaround from beyond life and see what it is that you were so scared of was. But for that one had to know what one looked like dead. To be not scared of it. To look at it as the culmination of all events like any other in your life. What then bothers us about dying? What, like John Donne, makes us want to live on and not face the dreadful and mighty death. It is the thought of terminating those bonds of affection which we built around us. Those who we learnt to love and protect and perhaps for whom we lived to provide best that a life on earth could offer. Protecting them from miseries brought on by ill-health and social life. And then one day it’s kaput. You just don’t exist for them anymore. You cannot reach back and tell them how much you felt for them. You cannot undo the mistakes. It is too late. You are beyond the terminus of life and from the yonder if you can indeed look back there is nary a thing you can do about it.
I came across a snap taken when I was in a post-surgery sleep. The hospital’s white covers seemed to provide an eerie feel to the snap like a lifeless person with a shroud. Almost like one could look at the climatic station of life. Is this how one looks when one is dead? I wondered! I stared at the picture for a long time mulling over the calmness that seemed to pervade the motionless face. The superstitious advisories of all elders on how to not speak about death as it waits in a station near you should you think of it, vanished. Instead there was serious introspection. I felt lie it was indeed some escape. No professional challenges to think of, no meaningless competitive work wars to fight over, no fears of financial security to worry about, no worries on how to protect a future that seemed to revolve only around preventing oneself from becoming poor or not having enough to eat and on a more practical note having enough to be proud in a peer group, live in a place at the end of your life in a house that seemed appropriate to your status, move around with friends as high up on the social ladder as possible and be rich enough to have the personal banker greet you with delight every time you visit the bank.
And then I cringed. How shallow! Looked at the picture again. Who will cry when I die? Not the companies you work for. Not the folks in the neighborhood you lived in. Because in the society today they will probably have to go to the Facebook page to know how the guy who died, looked like. Not the friends who will hurry up with their RIPs just in case they are seen as insensitive. Immediate family members will be affected of course. It is the impact of, bonds of habit, breaking. The comfort zone is disturbed. The fallacies of the person seem to recede in the background and a gloom filled arena of regret takes over. How things could have been better! It is the salutary effect of mourning with guilt where one hopes to want to undo sometimes genuinely and sometimes more as a societal compulsion.
But remember the train is moving on for the rest. The body has been dumped in the eternal journey of life. The memory of the dead person becomes a distant diminishing vision as the train chugs farther away. When you look over the wall do you get offended that people do not miss you or remember you as much as you would love them to do? But you cannot get offended. Regret is an emotion is on this part of the life terminus. One must remember that everyone gets eased out of the train at some point. Life goes on and it must go on for those who stay on and have to continue to worry about the miserable competitive living. Your photo hung on the wall is not going to help them. Your bank balance left behind to some extent will. But a physical presence till the end of their life could have.
You feel humbled when you imagine yourself dead. The acceptance of mortality has that effect. All that superiority buffing you up through the various perceived materialistic successes in life are futile unless they are spiritual. Spiritual that comes from an elevated soul. An elevation that emanates from doing well to society. To those around you. No success propelled by impaling those around you and making them lesser human beings will aid that elevation. Perhaps extending an emotional support system to living beings within the boundaries of a region, those within your physical and spiritual impact may perhaps rise above the framework of the physical universe and pervade the soul network if it exists.
What does this mean for us now when we can physically read this and how do we actualize its potential. I look at the snap again. Was it worth building up all that futile ego like carbon inside the engine of life reducing its efficiency and power? Anger that we perpetuate within ourselves to help fuel our negative emotions. Manipulate strategies with vile next steps in the world outside to step to the next level of perceived professional success and beam in the peer group of winners. Should I stop nurturing the little animal of revenge against people who have wronged me in life and use that energy elsewhere? Should I stop worrying about how to get that next big physical and materialistic asset, to be less ashamed of not conforming on time with similar winners from peer groups! Is my victory at being able to garner sufficient acknowledgement of everything I do in life or just use this magic of life that exists for now within me for a larger purpose.
I am not interested in finding greater spiritual meaning to life nor achieving super stardom in wealth and position on the ladder of success as those we work will hope to see in us. But I think the answer lies somewhere in between. But most importantly in not being afraid of death. You can be afraid of the pain that brings death. But not death itself. Death is only a culmination of a role that you were playing in a magical life.
Did you make the best of it or did you succumb to emotions controlled by the powerful chemicals in our brain. Did you reach a status where you looked from beyond the wall of life and in the parallel universe and smile (if you still can) and feel
“Hey that was not bad?” ‘It is good being DEAD. Divine Death. Understand it and you will perhaps embrace better life today’
