A Lesser Death

 

A very beautiful former actress died in the last week of February, 2018 of cardiac arrest in Dubai. Dying at 54 seems too premature for someone whose lively eyes and trilling voice enthralled millions for decades. The news was shocking and there was genuine outpour of grief. Death the darkest mystery stumps us. The actress but stays alive through her brilliant characters in 300 movies she starred in.

So what we do with this life matters more than anything else. We leave a tiny trail of memories for those still alive. Let’s at least try that we leave behind a bouquet of pleasant memories. Well, ‘some nice memories in a few hearts’ must be the hallmark of a successful life. It definitely makes death ‘lesser’ in magnitude.

However small is the arena of your life, the stage set up for you by the forces beyond your control, to dance on it or cry is fully within your prerogative. We can at least try to dance well with joy, of course without stepping on the feet of others doing the same. 

And to remind me how ubiquitous its tentacles are, death ruffled its feathers around me also. A puppy died under my little old car. It wasn’t a bloody death. The little thing must have been sleeping under the vehicle. I simply started the ignition. The wheels rolled for a few feet. I heard muffled sounds. I stopped and found the poor thing struggling for breath with a rattling death sound. It surely was my fault.

One must be considerate for the smaller world that we find almost non-existing around our feet. We take it for granted that the higher world of we humans is all that matters. We shouldn’t forget that to the bigger forces in nature there is hardly any difference between a microorganism and a human being. Both get tossed with the same nonchalance by the forces of nature. We just feel, cry, blame, act and react more. Other than this, there is no qualitative difference between an ant being crushed under a human foot and a human being getting crushed by the circumstantial wheels.  

Well, the writer is completely in acceptance of the responsibility of causing a death. With a bit of more awareness, it could have been avoided. The little thing would have been playing with its itchy siblings in the village street. All of us have our quotas of sins of omission and commission. And acceptance of a fault definitely puts one on the path of betterment. It adds a nice positive element to life.  

Beyond the apparent causes, death drives its own forces. It’s not, as most of us may think, the effect of some accident, disease, crime, happening or mishappening. It itself is the primary cause. The means of death are in fact the effects of death. Its surety, inevitability, the absolute truth behind it, makes it the cause in itself. Had there been an exception to mortality, maybe then it could have been taken as the effect of the apparent means of death.

Death stands alone as an absolute entity. Only the means vary. There are as many possibilities of the so called ‘reasons’ ascribed to death as there are thoughts in mind.

Given the ease with which death picks up its timing, it makes it almost a supreme force. This nullifying interlude is a great push in the cycled movement of things and phenomena.

It picks from the grossest to the easiest routes. All that we can pray for is a painless, simple, aged death—a fading away, a kind of ripened drop, a finely graduated trailing off, a reasonable sign off. A dull gaze of the old, almost blind eyes into the future. A centurion. A kind of lesser death.