Skip to main content

The Embarrassment called Death

 

A cemetery in central Kerala

If I were one of those Midnight’s children – i.e., born when the country’s first Prime Minister was redeeming its age-old tryst with destiny from the ramparts of the Red Fort – I would have been dead three decades now. The average life expectancy in India was 32 years in 1947. That wasn’t too bad. Most countries did not fare much better. The average life expectancy calculated for the world until 1900 was just 32. By the time India extricated itself from the British rule, the figure improved in many countries.

The Covid pandemic has made me increasingly conscious of death. Just the other day an acquaintance of mine passed away due to heart attack. He was a successful man by all normal standards: a professor in a college that paid the UGC scale to the staff. He was just 52 when death claimed him during sleep.

A day after that death, a 16-year-old student of mine gave me a call to ask whether she could do her English project on how certain people coped with the pain of bereavement caused by the pandemic. “I know many people who lost very dear ones but are coping gracefully,” the student told me. “I want to find out more about it.” I promised her all support. “You’re making the project a very meaningful activity,” I said.

Meaning? I questioned myself later. Has death any meaning? John Donne [1572-1631] was a British poet who was obsessed with death. He wrote many poems on the theme just to console himself that death was not the end. He was a religious person and believed that death was the beginning of eternal life. But he was scared of it anyway. His poems reveal his deep-rooted fear of death. Nevertheless, he had succeeded in writing a meaning into the phenomenon of death: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally,” he wrote in one of his many poems on death.

Donne had reasons to fear death. He had lost too many dear ones to death prematurely. Three of his 12 children died before they were ten. His wife herself died soon after giving birth to the twelfth child who was stillborn. Donne did not live to celebrate his 60th birthday.

Covid has made many of us acutely conscious of death: its unpredictability and possibly its imminence. What about the meaning of death? Well, I for one haven’t been able to find any yet. I’d rather console myself with some wry humour like the kind you find in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.


Death arrives wearing a black cloak while three couples are having dinner at a party. “How can we all have died at the same time?” One of the six asks. Death looks at the salmon mousse. “Darling, you didn’t use canned salmon, did you?” Geoffrey asks his wife whose response is, “I’m most dreadfully embarrassed.”

Embarrassment is probably the only meaning that death carries. Maybe, some people manage to make that embarrassment a little colourful. In the same movie, The Meaning of Life, there is a condemned man who is given the option to choose the manner of his death. He chooses to be chased off the Cliffs of Dover by topless women in sports gear until he falls into his own grave below. I wish I had that sort of imagination.  

Comments

  1. This is a very sensitive topic. Death has many connotations. Yes the pandemic saw many a death of near and dear ones and we all have our own share of grief. Religious people believe that death is a gateway to another life or to a place elsewhere and some believe in soul and spirit. But an agnostic person like me who recently lost many a dear friends and relatives, I think its just memories that the dead leave behind and its all chemistry and biology that ends it all.
    Lovely thought provoking read. As usual your post ending is superb.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Those who have lost someone dear can never take death lightly. Memories linger and inflict pain. My student who is doing the mentioned project was as aware of that as I was. She asked me whether it would be insensitive to ask people certain questions about the loss of their dear ones. I said we should do it with utmost sensitivity. Religious or agnostic, people will find it hard to accept certain losses.

      Delete
  2. Men fear death as children fear darkness. Well said by Francis Bacon! Death is enigmatic. How it became meaningful is more enigmatic. The perspective expresses here reminds me of Emily Dickinson's obsession with Death. She died rather early at the age of 52, I believe.
    Quite incidentally, I am writing a Brooksian analysis of The Paradox by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem is on the paradox of death. True, it is only after death, man wakes up eternally!
    Thank you for the valuable perspective shared by you in this write up!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Eternal life is a surmise, I believe. A consolation, a delusion... One can pretend to find meaning in death through such beliefs. But intellectual honesty(as Camus called it) would force one to confront the reality squarely in the face. When it comes to what lies beyond death, what is reality? Well, that's where the problem lies.

      Thanks for mentioning Dickinson and Dunbar.

      Delete
  3. Hari OM
    There is nothing in death, but that it is a final chapter for this life we all cling to so dearly. It is that clinging, like a child to its mother, which causes so many folk disturbance. Were we as distrubed about being born? It's just a process. But the human psyche thinks itself above all that - that there has to be a 'reason' for something which begun to end. The imagination builds all sorts of scenarios to comfort the living self. The fear of death is actually a fear of this life itself not continuing. Fear of change - one of the fundamental paranoias of our species. The only species which thinks in terms of eternity... every other critter on this earth simply accepts the process. We are the only critter that gets creative around such ending** - and if you think about it, it is only the living who can worry about death. Those already over the threshhold could care less!

    ** we are not the only critter that mourns the passing of loved ones, though. It is now firmly documented that other high-order species mourn their dead. But that they build up fears around death? No, that is we alone. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm inclined to think that as death approaches a person will become more peaceful and ready to accept it. Probably one will have a grand vision into one's life - both achievements and failures, contentment and regrets. And the final resignation. That's my imagination, of course.

      What is painful is the worry that goes before that stage of acceptance.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...