I have been thinking of death generally using my mother’s passing in May last year as a reference point. There is no sentimentality here but just some thoughts about the final irreversibility of death. One dies and that’s that.
One moment you are a throbbing corpus of joys and sorrows, angst and aspirations, melancholies and exhilarations, pains and pleasures and the next, all that ceases. That’s it. You are done.
Each human being, or for that matter each sentient life, being unique in its formation, lasts for whatever length of time they do and then fades away never to be seen. It is quite a remarkable phenomenon. Every moment is life and every moment is death.
One can only speculate what happens after death but for me death ends it. There is nothing beyond that. The idea that someone—in this case my mother because that is the reference point for now—who was encased in a particular corporeal case with all her joys and sorrows, angst and aspirations, melancholies and exhilarations, pains and pleasures can never return is, for me, strangely reassuring. Done is done sort of thing.
I think of my mortality frequently enough; sometimes wanting to hasten it because you know what’s the point? I have long insisted that any emotion, be it painful or pleasurable, lasts in all its genuine essence for no more than 10 minutes. Anything after that is just an embellished reminiscence, a contrivance. My death, whenever that happens, would cause pure pain in my immediate family for no more than ten minutes. It is of course a presumption on my part that it would cause pure pain at all. It is entirely conceivable that it may not.
Coming back to the finality of death, where a person is completely erased, deleted if you will, it is peerless. One has to die to know what it means to die even for a nanosecond. And then there is nothing to retain what the one who died might have felt. Brilliant.
