"Just Look!
Even the blossoms that are destined to fall tomorrow
Are blooming now in their life's glory."
- Takeko Kujo
Many people i know do not like to talk about it. Especially from an Indian perspective, death is not something that you talk about. I will not debate the issue of what happens after death. It is a realm that we cannot see and whatever your belief, it is personal and not up for discussion.
It has been almost two years since my grandfather passed away. He was my mother's dad. He was a doctor. When i was young i used to go with him to the clinic and sit outside his door as he took care of his patients. Half way through, we would stroll out for a break. The clinic was located right in the middle of usman road, T.Nagar ( think of mardi gras with clothes on - in terms of number people, nothing kinky). The both of us would have a Duke's lemonade and something to bite on and then he would buy me anything that i wanted and we would head back to clinic to wrap things up.
My father's job called for us to hop from one place to next and we had to leave Madras. I spent most of my summer holidays at my grandparents in Madras. I used to spend my afternoons chatting with him. A particularly animated discussion on the difference between hydrocele and haematocele is something that i will never forget. I think it was something to do with the fact that he was a doctor. He could discuss sex and its accoutrements in an instructively plain manner; something many cannot do.
Before i left the country, he visited us in Madras (by this time, he had moved to Salem and we to Madras). We had a lot of fun together. I was all grown up and we were having a nice time with bad language and a lot of innuendo. My mother was furious with me but my grandfather told her to let it go this time as he was having the best time he had had in years. He said he felt he was feeling much younger. I am sure he was holding out on me, but i had to believe him.
The next time i saw him, he was clinically dead. A stroke had put him into a coma and a ventillator was pumping air into him like he was a tire tube with a puncture. I couldn't gather enough courage to even touch him. I always felt that the person lying before me would somehow wake up and say 'hi' if i touched them; as if they were only sleeping. This scared me and still does. My grandfather passed away a couple of days later.
Probably the only thing i felt was shame. Strangely no sense of loss. My mother's side of the family is very strong. Even so, my grandmother was shaken to her core, but held herself together. My mother would break down at times, momentarily but would pull herself together. I couldn't even touch him! It kept going back and forth in my head. I was born prematurely and was no longer than four to five inches long and covered with wrinkled skin. According to my mother, my grandfather was instrumental in making sure that i made it. And now, i couldn't even hold his hand.
I am not haunted by it. I am only trying to understand why i acted the way i did. Was it because i felt than my grandfather was no longer alive? What then is being alive? Life has to be something more; Is death nothing more than wiping a hard disk and tossing the hardware out for recycling?
Why do we mourn death so? I wonder if it is because of the sense of loss we feel in the world that we have lost someone we loved or that it shatters the illusion of stability that we create for ourselves. Read somewhere long ago that the only thing we know for certain from the day were are born is that we will die; we know not when or how but we know we surely will. To live with this thought in your mind; really consider it everday allows you to value the time you have been given. This doesn't work with me. Apparently, it does wonders for Steve Jobs.
3 comments:
Having been brought up in a science stream (as compared to something like Commerce or Arts or Culinary Science), I naturally dissected the questions you posed into multiple smaller ones. One could probably argue that what I attempted to do is not in fact scientific or psychology oriented, but lets leave that out for another topic for the time being.
What I also did - unknowingly or knowingly is compare it to my experience when my father passed away in '96. Again, the argument that the comparison is invalid as the factors (not same relation, different geographical location, different academic status by which I imply different level of maturity) were not the same, will infact hold.
But assuming these factors were infact neglected or assumed to have a very minor effect on "How does one deal with a near one passing away". Having satisfied my critics (and any legal issues?) with this assumption, let me attempt (yes attempt only) to answer some questions posed here.
Your reaction of refusal to touch your granddad (and your thought of refusal superseeding the thought of offending your grandmom and mom by this refusal) would be quickly categorized as clinicians as "Fear of accepting the reality" and your way of denial of the current situation. They would also probably state that this has scarred you emotionally for the rest of your life. A psychotherapist would probably be salivating at the thought of having you as a patient, to remove this scarred memory and replacing this with a better memory. In essence what they would ask you do is remember the good memories (which you have already mentioned in the earlier section) and replay them in your mind. Our mind has the tendency to remember the repetitions more than 1 off occurences (unless they are played over again in our mind).(PS. Thanks Human factors class).
Now on to my interpretation of the events you have written. In my personal view (you can never be sure of the legal implications), what essentially you were doing is trying to put a brave face for yourself. What you were afraid of was not him getting up and saying 'Hi' (infact you could possibly be secretly wishing for that which you misinterpreted). In medical conditions, I am sure that you must have had a helpless feeling where you personally can do absolutely nothing to help him out. Your granddad being a doctor did do something to help you out. Man is by nature competitive and when you feel so helpless, your mind / soul / ego cannot take that brunt truth. So it reverses the wishes and fears (atleast according to me). This is corroborated by the fact that in most dire situations, the most feeble people have shown fearsome courage. So what you felt as a fear, could possibly be have been what your were strongly wishing for. However you also knew that even if you touched him, he wouldn't get up and go home and so the contradiction and hence the refusal to burst the bubble of your wish and hence the refusal to touch him.
Moving on to your analogy of death to wiping a hard disk. I am certainly not a very learned person, but I could possibly categorize myself as a person who has some experiences with people close to me crossing that bridge (another analogy). So to answer your question of what is alive (and I am not capable of quoting the Gita or other texts on this), according to me, its anything that is conveying or transmiting - what (could be energy / knowledge / light / auditory / movement / feeling). People would jump on me by saying 'That means everything because everything emits energy / light etc etc'. So when you stop conveying, stop emiting feelings (by wincing, talking, eating, snoring etc you get the idea) you are not alive. So moving a step ahead, people who renounce (are sanyasis) and meditate are alive on a level of emiting thoughts only and not in the physical sense. People who are dead (A La my dad, your granddad) are also not alive on the phyical level, but could possibly still emitting on another level (sense of him being close-by on some occasions). When they cremate/bury the body, they know that the person is not going to emiting on the physical level.
Certainly open to more discussion on this and any critique.
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i think you give me more credit (for my capcity for feeling) than what is actually due. I felt the same when a lot of other people i knew passed on. i don't see death as something to be avoided and my mind doesn't reject the notion. When my grandad did pass on, it didn't want him to wake up. I knew how he felt about his own mortality and he too didn't fear it. He always said he had done what he wanted to do and all that mattered to him was that his wife (my grandmom) was looked after after he was gone.
i think i am more comfortable accepting death as a concept but bewildered by its actual occurence. would you saw that is a fair assesment on my part? i think it has to do with physical reality and the way we perceive things. People can physically exist or not but they do stay in your head. Think of the fact that we haven't seen our family for more than a year or so. we know they physically exist but we have no way of knowing for sure, until we see them again. Even if you didn't call them or make no contact for a year, you still know they exist. Limit this time period to infinity, how does your mind grapple with that? more later. about to hit the sack.
I certainly did not say that you or your mind (I prefer the distinction) made this choice knowingly. It was done rather reclusively in dark corner of your mind (think slums behind commissioner's office & under rail line at Marina beach) and didnt care to inform the rest.
As far as you feeling the same feeling about somebody else also, just goes to prove my point home.
As far as perceiving death goes, nobody is claiming that you are not compatible with the concept of death or refusing to accept it or something like that. Our mind chooses to Fill-in-blanks per se when it comes to such things. When you talk on the phone / email / chat with someone you know, your mind is basically registering it as data filled in to account for that person's continued existence. Its also the reason why my mom continues to read the letters that my dad wrote to her and she has preserved all of my dad's written work, just because that fills-in-the gaps. Although she too knows that the gaps will open up again.
And as far as being bewildered when you see death occuring (which is experiencing something first hand something you have just read about), is acccording to me a novice reaction. One does tend to afraid the first time you ride a bike or swim. God forbid but if someone gets to cremate people within a short time frame (when will I stop showing off), then that person would have lesser fear. I THINK.
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