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| 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteLovely thought provoking read. As usual your post ending is superb.
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.
DeleteMen 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.
ReplyDeleteQuite 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!
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.
DeleteThanks for mentioning Dickinson and Dunbar.
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteThere 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
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.
DeleteWhat is painful is the worry that goes before that stage of acceptance.