About Death, of Its Being and Time
Years ago, my mother had received a similar phone call. First it was her mother, and in years to come, one early morning ring at a time, it was three of her brothers. I had only fallen asleep for some moment when the same sound started echoing in the dark. One time my mother told me she had seen flashes of what appeared to be a graveyard seconds before waking up to one of those calls. I didn’t think she was lying but still, it was odd. Yet fast forward to that instant, somehow, I was certain that my best friend for eight years was on the other end of the line, and at that moment I no longer deemed it so.
Only hours before I had taken the train back to my hometown to pay her mother a visit at the hospital. She had told me earlier how palliative care in the intensive unit was the only option left. The unit was restricted even to family members. Visiting relatives were allowed to look through an observation panel as scheduled throughout the day. I was warned not to startle myself at the sight of her mother as she had become less recognizable. She was unarguably different. I thought gaunt might be one of the words for it. But as she let out a smile, despite the debility raging in her gaze, and waved avidly at her colleagues who arrived around the same time as I did, I still sensed the familiarity, of someone whom I owed a home that warmed my bones like my own.
I tried to gain some more sleep after the news broke, since I would have to rise early for the funeral. But my mind was bolting frantically. I never knew what to do, not even when it was my own mother. I remembered the cracks in her cry, as if there was a rupture somewhere within. I remembered my father’s futile sweat on calming her. He had no clue on how to trace the fissure. I remembered laying motionless by her side and watching her burst piece by piece. I wished holding her tightly was enough to save her from losing another fragment of herself, but it dissolved so hastily into a quicksand of misery.
The house was already flocked when I arrived. There’s a series of procession in the event of passing according to our belief. Common practice includes bathing the body, shrouding the corpse, praying specifically for the deceased, then completed by burial. Mourners are allowed to pass their final respect and pray for the janazah while the body was still laid down on their home prior being taken to the cemetery. The sight of this always suffocates me, the lack of air from all the gasping, as if the room was flooded in sorrow. The sight of those bluish faces and quivering shoulders from having been afloat in tears of remorse and despondency.
Closest relatives and other well-wishers often tag along for the burial as well. Custom calls for the next of kin to lower the body into the grave. The devoted husband and the two brothers of my best friend carried this task in delicate grace before clasping each other atop of it afterwards like a condolence wreath. In every eulogy, we were always reminded of our fate, that every one of us would face our own end. Along this line was where I pondered most about death. Not of its time, but of its being.
I pictured Death as this lonesome man. Each of us had met him at birth, but since then separated and inhabited different world. We led our whole lives in mindfulness. But Death, having lost the battle for our soul to his nemesis that is life itself, grew into a wandering spirit that resided in solitary. Death had been watching us from a safe distance, from dim corners of our reality. He placed a bet on our breath every time we acted perilously, or when an illness invaded our cells, or when our days had gone aimless. Death was forbearing in his longing for us, until the day he found an ally in a mishap, or in a disease, or in despair. The day he reunited once more with what had been kept apart entirely by life.
Around a week later, over cups of coffee, a dear friend was telling me bits of what he remembered about his father who had passed away when he was six. He had spent more years of his life without his father than with. There were too few of memories to ache for his presence but he wished he had more time. And then it hit me, how every grief I had witnessed in my life rhymed. It didn’t matter if you lost someone so early, or when your life had just begun in your early twenties, or when you already had a family of your own. Every one of them wished upon the same thing: more time.
Perhaps I was wrong, Death’s being is its time, the two weren’t disparate entities. Time is the embodiment of what took us off of life. Time knows no mercy as I came to a realization that not only it returns us to Death but more than that, time impairs the living by doing so. Time was the invisible cracks in my mother’s cry. Time was the suffocation I suffered from. Time, and how it remains, keep our wounds from loss wet. Until time, and how it runs out, come to turn us into another wound, another loss for somebody else.
