A few deaths

Some dreams just don’t fade like the reality; they don’t glare in either, but creeps in and freaks you out. Some dreams about a few I knew haunt me. Some are dead, some alive. Some in a trance, some in a deep despair and some like in the dream I dreamt the other day about an elderly- good- woman-friend of him. She was naked and looked pale like a pearly white ghost. Her body glowed like the moon on a starless night. Her breasts were full and looked sagged. Her stomach showed her youth replaced with folds of fat. She looked heavenly with a calmness that only the blessed-dead could have. I felt happy for her, but all the while guilty for having imagined her that way. I wonder why I dreamed her death, for she is the still-healthy living woman.

Deaths have always scared the day lights out of me. I was scared, haunted, rather to an extent possessed by death all through my growing up days. I have more wondered about death, as where people would go after life. How someone who lived all their life could, just disappear to nowhere after death.

The first death I saw was that of my neighbour uncle, who died of a heart-attack, I still remember how shocked and frozen, I was when I saw him first with his head tied with a white cloth and cotton filled in his nostrils. Will that be done to me once when I die? It disturbed me to know that people would be taken to heaven that way. I ran from the place and went to my bedroom and hid under the cot, thinking that I could evade death. I remember how I hid under the blankets on my bed and peeped out of the window to see him been taken to the heavenly abode.

Deaths scared me only, till I hadn’t met it. The first death for which I cried was for Tiger, a faithful dog of mine. She died having lived her life; it was the first stab of pain for a ten year old. I couldn’t understand what it would be then for me, to be a ten year old and to cry and grieve for the loss of a loved one. All I knew then and now was; it hurts. I look back from then till now, I learnt that with every death, a part of me inevitably dies, I bury a part of myself and it creates a vacuum in me. An emptiness that turns to a scar in me, a wound that I wish time heals, knowing otherwise that, Till death do us apart.

As I grew up, I understood one thing; death is a great-leveller of life. It teaches us love and humility, and with every death I have learnt to love more and be more humble. I have learnt to love everyone around for they may not be alive to be loved tomorrow or I may not be alive to hate them today. It has humbled me, for I have learnt the value of life through death. How I wish I could trade in these lessons for the life of a dead-few.

The scene of her lying clad in her angelic white bride wear in her coffin, ever smiling her sweet smile to the world of her loved ones. I wish God could have understood the value of love, if then He wouldn’t have taken her with him, the scene of a middle-aged mother, knowing well that her orphaned-son had no-one to love and to be loved, the death of a grand-father who gave away his old age to the pain of cocktails of radiation and chemotherapy rather than the loving company of his grandchildren, the death of a brother whose youthful life was wasted in drugs. It is the way life is learnt through a few deaths.

Life is when you know that death doesn’t stop things, it doesn’t end a relationship, but how the cursed few learn to carry the life of the dead in them. Life is when it sharply pains at the stab of a twinge of a remembrance of the long-gone-loved one and a tear or two is dropped and you brush it aside with your finger and turn aside, Smile gently and offer the prayer. I Love You.