Death Shall Die II

Death Be Not Proud

Last Monday, we went to the ICU of a local hospital to see a relative suffering from cancer. He was under life-support system. The situation was grim. An oxygen mask was fixed covering his nose and mouth. He was breathing rather heavily. The eye-lids were fixed. The eyes were open and had a fixed stare. He was not blinking. And in the morning of Tuesday, we received the news that he was no more. We visited the grieving family that day.

The image of his blink-less eyes has been permanently fixed in my mind.

My mind travels down the cases where I was a witness to dying or dead persons. As a child I was told about the death of my baby-sister, my only sister. I was too young to remember the scene. In our place babies who die in infancy, are buried and not cremated like older persons who die. As such, my baby-sister was buried. I remember being told by my family-members that when the people who took her for burial came back, I ran after them with a threatening stick asking them why they had taken away my sister.

I was not present when my father and later, my mother died. Our custom does not permit keeping a dead body for long to become ‘stale’. Where a person dies at night, the body is cremated the same night. As such I did not have the chance to see the bodies of my father or mother. My father died suddenly soon after retirement from Govt. service. My mother lived till she was past eighty. I had last seen her about a fortnight before her death.

I was not present when my brother, just elder to me, died. I arrived soon after the death of my younger brother, saw his body and participated in his cremation. His elder son gave the mukhagni. I was not present when my father-in-law suddenly died of heart-failure. I had last seen my ailing and hospitilised mother-in-law about a week before her death. I had attended her cremation.

The father-in-law of my elder brother was suffering from cancer. He was operated upon at Vellore and after this, his condition seemed to improve. Later it deteriorated. When he knew what was going to come, he committed suicide by jumping before a train, leaving a suicide note.

As I had to move over different places on transfer, we had no chance to stay in the house which I had built, till after my retirement. The house has an extra self-contained room where I used to stay during my brief visits. One night, during one such visit, at about 10 P M, I was told that an old lady in my tenant’s family had just died. I went down to see her. She was in her nineties. She was sitting on her bed and just dropped down with a slight thud. The family decided to take the body to their native place for cremation. By the time a death certificate was obtained, all other arrangements were made and the body was taken, it was 2 A M. I could not sleep the whole night.

When I was working at Chaibasa, a small District Head Quarters town in Jharkhand, I had become almost a family-member of many of the householders including non-customers. I used to get invited to almost all festivals and birth-ceremonies. During my stay there, I received the news of the death of one of the customers of my Bank. I immediately rushed there and was with them till the cremation.

When a person is diagnosed with a terminal illness like cancer and knows that he/she has only a few more days, how would he be feeling? What would be the feeling of his family-members? The two sons of this relative of mine arrived soon after being told that the dreaded moment was approaching. How would they have felt? They realized the inevitability, tried to prepare their mother for the fast coming loss and tried to persuade their mother to ‘let him go’.

In a Hindi film that I had watched some years ago, the protagonist was suffering from cancer. Everybody, his family-members, relatives, friends and colleagues, would become somber when he would come near them but he would always be cheerful and joyous! Knowing that his days were numbered, he tried to make the most of those days and spread cheer everywhere. Is it possible in real life?

At the time of someone’s death, we become philosophical. During my student-days, I had read a poem which had a few lines like this: a snake had grabbed a frog and was trying to swallow it. The frog was struggling to escape from the snake’s jaws. Yet, when the frog saw a dragon fly flapping its wings above its head, it extended its tongue, caught the fly and gobbled it up!

How is one to be prepared to face death? Lalita Pawar, who used to perfectly play the role of oppressive mother-in-law Hindi films and who played the role of Manthara in Ramanand Sagar’s TV Serial Ramayan, was living all alone. Her neighbours noticed about her death full 3 days after she had died in her closed house.

I had read somewhere, “Talk happiness; the world is sad enough without your woes.”