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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. Nima DasAugust 28, 2021 at 1:23 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 28, 2021 at 7:13 PM

      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. DawnanddewAugust 28, 2021 at 2:32 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 28, 2021 at 7:17 PM

      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. Yamini MacLeanAugust 28, 2021 at 6:25 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 28, 2021 at 7:20 PM

      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

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