Notes on Death

This is not horrible. Darfur is horrible. Serbia is horrible. People starving to death coz stupid politicians always invariably make false promises is horrible. But an old woman dieng of complications due to age surrounded by friends and family is supposed to be ideally normal. It isn't. Its horrible.

We can already perhaps feel It standing behind us. Light shines down on my grandma lieing there on the neat and clean sheets of the hospital bed with the oxygen mask strapped to her mouth. We surround her - make a circle like a fortress wall around her, keeping the light in. But behind our backs, in the shadows where the light does not reach, we can feel Its lascivious gaze fixed on the back of our necks. Its wheezing breath smelling of rot and decay, devoid of all moisture and warmth makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up like thorns in a rose bush. Death, greedy Death, In its garb of hooded black robe. Hiding its mottled white skin under the thick woollen fabric, stinking with the smell of moths and dirt.

It gets all of us in the end. It knows all of us hate it. Want it to go away. Especially when we have once felt its presence in our lives. But it knows we are nothing but helpless in its wake. And so it giggles away in utter glory. To the dismay of most mortals.

But there are those few who challenge it. Keep calling it and teasing it. And those who stand defiantlyin front of it and say - "Come get me!". These are those men and women who have no strings pulling them down - strings of desire, strings of affection, strings of revenge, strings of duty, strings of kaleidoscopic colors attached to silver and grey memories.

It is while I write this that I realize the ingredients of mortality are far more varied than what I first suspected. Mortality doesn't solely reside in the telomeric regions of our chromosomes. Nor in the defective genes in our cells, in the extra cholesterol in our blood sequestering our heart, the wrinkles on our skin and our lungs. It lies also in the wisdom and knowledge that deepens the grooves of our brains. It lies in the loss of innocence - the first heart break, the first fall from grace, the first realisation that the world is far removed from the colors of our childhood. Our mortality becomes more ingrained in our marrows when we fall in love - with our mother's cooking, with the smell of wet earth after the first rains, with the boy with the dimpled cheek and spark of the morning star in his deep dark eyes. Our mortality acquires flesh and blood when we learn to hate - the corruption in the system, our infidel fathers, our back-stabbing lovers and friends, our own unkept promises, our very existence.

It is only those who pass through their lives fully aware of their mortality, with no desire to live beyond death, who become truely immortal. Coz they live their lives as if there's no tomorrow. They live on in the memories of the species; In the winds of time. Their souls gain the ability to speak with generations through their work. Their Souls have a voice that resonates beyond the dark and dusty halls of Death and Its Ministers of War and Famine. They live on in the hearts of the ones they loved and rescued; inthe eyes of their children. They are the Undefeated. The only true Champions.