The Morbid Affair

Greetings readers! Its been forever since the last one. The reason could be perhaps the fact that out of all the fleeting thoughts nothing seemed to stay at one place. However something was bugging me for quite a lot of time so I've decided to flush it out.

Like all professional texts that start with a cool quote from someone 'famous' I too have got something from the internet 

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

-George Eliot

Well yes now you know what I'm going to rant about today as the title suggested. Just a disclaimer dear reader, all what follows are just my own opinion. I can only imagine what everyone has gone through and everyone has got their own opinions and degrees of feelings on this. Anyways, lets cut to the chase shall we?

Death is something I can never truly understand, perhaps no one could. It joins hands with time and comes straight at you like a runaway train and is as strange as life is. I happened to pull myself together to read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut for my exams. The reading experience was, how do I put this..... different.

Different in the sense, it was a anti war novel based on a World War II survivor who lapsed into a complete mental oblivion transporting himself between different timelines at the same moment. Well there's a lot of amazing ideas in the book so lets not get carried away by that. So the reason I brought it up is because I remembered a quote, actually someone really close to me reminded me the quote which is what inspired me to write this episode. In the book every time someone dies or is killed in the brutal form in the war, the narrator comments a light-hearted statement 'so it goes'. There's about a hundred times it occurs in the  book.

Seeing death as a natural occurrence could be the most logical and reasonable explanation being human. We're bound by the human condition, we laugh we cry we feel. We see happiness in birth and youth, we see sorrow in disease and death. Interestingly though none of this words mean anything. A youth can die multiple times before his death. A man on his deathbed can be more alive than anyone in the world. I came across read the book The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy. Russian books are sure gloomy as it gets (sorry for the bias). The books about a dude who had a terminal illness and eventually falls into fatal sleep as the title suggests. The idea behind the book is that only at the last few moments of his life he attains this sort of happiness that no one around him could understand. He is in a sort of drug induced trance where his joy is beyond reason. 

So after all this we've reached no further from where we have started. Death is as strong as a driving force as life is, and for us humans ironically it drives life better than life actually does. But then again we have them who welcome death, who looks death at the face and are reborn. So confusing.

As it comes to the loss of a loved one its equally inexpilcable. During my school days we had a story about a old lady who lost her husband due to age. Naturally I expected the old lady to cry her heart out or something but she seemed to be happy. Happy not for the death but happy as she could see beyond it. She somehow managed to cherish even death too although it was the death of someone she loved. Only a few could go beyond the margin laid by death I could say.

Finally what do I think? To be honest dear reader, I have absolutely no clue what to say despite whatever I talked about the whole time. I'm afraid, I'm most truly afraid and I guess its all a matter of perspective. Anyways that is all for todays one. New ones coming up soon. Stay tuned!