Tag Archives: death

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Partings, Bitter and Sweet…

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Dirge Without Music”

 

They say learning to let-go is the hardest lesson of life. For it is not a person’s thoughts that are missed in their absence, as much as their thoughtfulness. All things do come to an end and when the farewells have all been said and done or in cases tacitly implied, parts of them – their sentiments, their gestures remain with us; having subtly shaped us and that shared past into the present. What is missed is their twinkling eyes and singular statements that betrayed a yearning, and the delicate significance within those ephemeral moments that withheld a thousand promises.

To forget them is to deny your very being and to live with them nigh impossible. So what must a man do? How does one accept and move on?

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The Grim Reaper

The futility of our elaborate plannings became evident when this Deepawali, as I reached home, I received the news of an untimely death of someone I knew. It was a road accident – the usual case of a truck driver assuming the road to be his dominion.
Man proposes, God disposes. To me it appears to be a quote off  The Dark Knight peppered with subtlety: “I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” Probably God thinks on the same lines as The Joker: “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”

Talking of God, I remember reading somewhere: most animals have been gifted with just a basic level of memory. They rely more on their instincts. This means that some time after a herd of deer has been hunted and a member killed and consumed, the survivors forget all about the incident. This actually helps them survive. They don’t live under the constant shadow of death and yet are wary of their predators owing to their instincts. (Imagine what would happen to your appetite, if you knew you were soon going to turn into somebody else’s morsel.) The Maker does have a sense of humor and he gave a lot of thought to this world in its making. He didn’t give humans a short-term memory probably because we are meant to do a lot more than just surviving (It’s a different issue altogether that some of us still choose to do just that.). But he gives them hope  beyond reason and the ability to move on.
Life is fragile, snuffed out in an instant. Still, with all the inevitability of death and the evanescence of life, it is the latter that is the stronger element of the two and has been cherished since the forging of this world. And beneath all this randomness of the post there is an order now in my thoughts and  I am glad… I live!