HOW does death come for those we love?
My father in his wasting state battling terminal stage cancer recognized that death was upon him when he started hearing frantic conversations between his inner organs when he was sleeping. It must be perplexing to suddenly hear the murmur of complaints of your biological components inside your head after a lifetime of silently performing their perpetual duty until one integral part had to give. For him, it was his heart that gave up sending a pool of blood onto his stomach which he expelled in his last gasps of life, his body turning limp and heavy in my arms.
I had reason to believe that he knew that the final moment was coming.
One’s constitution announces it beforehand in many different ways. That could be the function and purpose of debilitating illness after all, to make you aware and account for the final months, weeks, and days until that final breath. But I wonder if indeed in the final moments, there was recognition and consciousness that this was all there was to life - the end.
It is a moot point actually, a useless curiosity, given that there was a life full of contemplation before the appointed event of death. By virtue of one’s passing, there is automatically veritable proof that there was a life, a narrative, that includes the bereaved who bears the burden of one’s painful departure.
For the dying, and we all are in varying degrees actually, death is the final respite and the ultimate culmination of the joys and sufferings of life. It should be welcomed like a cold refreshing inebriating drink after a long tiring day.
How is death confronted by the bereaved?
Truth be told, the drama actually emanates not from the dying or the dead but from the grief and despair of those left behind. There is an opposite impulse for those that the dying leave behind. Death comes as inevitability for the sick and dying, but it is to be rejected and fought against by the loved ones fearful of being abandoned.
It is not easy to understand where the impulse to struggle against the death of loved ones came from. It is the singular source of so much grief and despair of what could otherwise be a given fact of life that we must accept without fanfare. Everyone inevitably passes on. From a different frame, funerals should be occasions of celebration over the life that was lived and not about the life that has ended. But why is it that our cultural regard for death is skewed towards the latter?
For those bereaved, death always comes like a thief. And we guard our loved ones from the grip of its dark and long tentacles in a desperate attempt to reverse the given inertia of life towards destruction and decay.
I remember the pacts I made with saints and my conscience to relieve the physical suffering of loved ones, the foolish optimism and desperate belief in miracle cures that did not alleviate. And the deadening realization of what could not be stopped that is reflected in the eyes of a loved one wasting away.
It is not spoken about but seen and felt in the heavy droop of the shoulders of the sickly beloved, and their blank stares into nothingness. What is more painful is not the physical ordeal of illness but the emotional toll of seeing loved ones helpless before one's suffering. Their pain is the reflected anguish of loved ones who do not want to let go.
Such actually is the dance of life. The dialectics of existence if you may, between the dying and the indomitable spirit of life, between those who have gone ahead and those left behind, locked forever in a perpetual thug-of-war between embrace and letting go.
This insistence to hold on, against the odds, against death. We have a term for this. Isn’t this what we call as love?
