It happened about two years ago. A bunch of my friends and our college seniors were off to give our passing out seniors a farewell treat. I don't know how many we were when we set out on that day. But we came back with a head count of one less than what we were at the start of the day.
Fragile little thing it is, this life of ours. It slips away without anyone noticing. One moment, your heart's beating. Next moment, one might see a flat line. And it is just not in death that we see the bleakness in all that we hold so dear. Look at how old you are. Then look at how much time you've spent on this beautiful planet. Where, how, and how swiftly did time just... pass by, like a gust of wind, or a lightning bolt to a few?
I don't like to call a lot many things "Mine" barring a few. The college I've spent a good fifth of my life in which, is surely on that small "Mine"-list of mine.
Until I came to this place, death wasn't a phenomenon I was akin to. It happened in the passing, but nothing about death fascinated me, or left me awestruck.
Enter college, and my tryst with a disappearance of life force began. That said, I haven't yet watched my own life edging away from me. I have felt like I would die. But all those times have been at times when my mental faculties couldn't be relied upon. Moving on!
Suicides, murders, genocides, executions and all the events documenting the sudden absence of lives have been well documented. We've had them in our school books, our movies, in news, and in most cases in our next of kin. Often, it is word of mouth that reaches us. We don't witness it. We're just there for the final proceedings, to mourn, sympathize, offer condolences, etc.
What's strange is that hearing of death on the news, and hearing about death that happened about a mile away from the place you sit, that too from people you know and see everyday are two completely different feelings. On the news, it just happens. No apologies for sounding cold, but when we hear about death on the news, we're mostly sitting on a couch, hoping some clown on the screen will shout and make ruckus around himself. And hence, we watch NEWS! Death is another topic the channel will cover. Death is part of North, East, West and South. Ain't it?
Outside, in reality, depending on your proximity, and level of acquaintance to the deceased, it almost feels like a part of you has gone away. For all you know, you might not even know the chap personally. But it hits you where you least expected to.
Witnessing a death is obviously a whole different ball-game. It gets hard to breathe. Specially when you see the father cry. Specially when the mother's still sitting a thousand miles away, thinking her son's still alive. Specially when the older brother is abroad, and cannot make it to the funeral of the one he owes a big chink of his own childhood to. Specially when the picture in the frame with the garland has a smiling face on it. A face that was among us yesterday, day before, or maybe even hours or minutes ago.
In Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut, the author, mentions the perception of death in the minds of higher dimensional creatures. For these creatures have an x, y, z and a TIME axis. They can do time travel. And so, for them a person never dies. He's just alive in the past.
Someone make a bloody time-machine!
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