STRAY THOUGHTS ON DEATH AND DYING

Like many others, I too had been inspired by Steve Jobs. Having known the importance of picking up the pieces of one’s life and carrying on, I somewhere deep within felt a sense of bonding, one that established a connection that obliterated all notions of scale. Reading and learning from the words that were now finding increasing space and visibility, my mind was arrested by one striking line that stood out from among many others and urged me to cross the boundary from reflection to expression: We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I had always been fascinated by death, as somewhere down the line we all are – maybe by its elusiveness or maybe by the sheer mystery that surrounded it. Every time I heard of it what arrested me the most were the reactions of those living – their manner of approaching death itself as also their reactions to that particular situation and most importantly to the person who had just died. For me the paradox of death lay in the fact that it somehow seemed to bring out the value of the person’s life. All that the person had said or stood for suddenly seemed to acquire a value that was far deeper than anything that had gone before. Without really undermining the emotions that people expressed, I wondered whether all that was said on the occasion or after it really mattered. All that the person had done suddenly seemed to acquire new meaning and depth with all faults being wiped out, possibly in the light of an unconscious realisation, somewhere deep within that one would now have to suffer them anymore.

Was death really then the end or was it actual awareness that it was not the end of the presence of another but being made to realise the value of what the person meant to you and what the person stood for. And then would being able to witness the reactions to one’s death not be the most valuable moment of all....... and since that would not really be possible would it not be better to react to other’s as if they were dead rather than living, giving the other a different sense of who s/he really is or then possibly affording him/her the scope to actually become that way, making life more meaningful than death.