How disturbing would it be to find out that the person who offered you a seat in the metro, or the person you helped cross the road, or the person who sold you those pink earrings at round the corner, or the person with whom you had a very memorable conversation last evening while waiting at the coffee house, or all of them at once-- are dead. No more. Gone to a place which noone has ever seen, yet everyone keeps talking about.
How strange it sounds how profoundly death— irrespective of our relation with the person— affects us, leaves a permanent mark: a wound; a scar.
Some people get irritated when you talk to them about death. It's like the unspeakable truth everyone keeps fearing and avoiding and distracting one's mind from. They know it's inevitable, "but why talk about something that makes you sad?", say most people who are convinced that I am obsessed with the idea of death.
But why not talk about it like one talks about marriage, or further educational pursuits, or dispelling one's virginity, or jobs- which are more or less equally unpredictable. We make a million plans: only a quarter of them work out as we imagined. People dwell over their dream wedding, or their dream vacation, and when I ask them about their dream death—long awkward silence, followed by looks as if you have shoved a knife straight into their gut.
Because we always want to cling on! This desperate need to make things last forever, even human life. We know it's impossible but we like to believe it isn't. So we would close our ears when someone would say the opposite.
What we don't realize is that the only things that last till you do are memories. So why not embrace them, accept their transcendentalism?
How disturbing it was to think about deaths of those people! And how fascinating it is to know that their last memory of the living world which they would carry to the other world(if any) would be of an episode with a stranger. And the stranger, in so many cases, is you!
How strange it sounds how profoundly death— irrespective of our relation with the person— affects us, leaves a permanent mark: a wound; a scar.
Some people get irritated when you talk to them about death. It's like the unspeakable truth everyone keeps fearing and avoiding and distracting one's mind from. They know it's inevitable, "but why talk about something that makes you sad?", say most people who are convinced that I am obsessed with the idea of death.
But why not talk about it like one talks about marriage, or further educational pursuits, or dispelling one's virginity, or jobs- which are more or less equally unpredictable. We make a million plans: only a quarter of them work out as we imagined. People dwell over their dream wedding, or their dream vacation, and when I ask them about their dream death—long awkward silence, followed by looks as if you have shoved a knife straight into their gut.
Because we always want to cling on! This desperate need to make things last forever, even human life. We know it's impossible but we like to believe it isn't. So we would close our ears when someone would say the opposite.
What we don't realize is that the only things that last till you do are memories. So why not embrace them, accept their transcendentalism?
How disturbing it was to think about deaths of those people! And how fascinating it is to know that their last memory of the living world which they would carry to the other world(if any) would be of an episode with a stranger. And the stranger, in so many cases, is you!
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