Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
- Mark Twain (Following the Equator)
I was not breathing.
Not at all.
Everything was blacking out.
The first thing that I made note of, about it, was that the age-old depiction of death done by various authors and Hollywood/Bollywood filmmakers wasn’t entirely incorrect after all.
Your whole life does flash before your eyes, during death.
Every single important memory of mine unfolded before me with unparalleled speed but crystal-clarity (not talking about the picture quality here) nonetheless.
The sad part was that there were too few of ‘em. 21 years of life and so little, of it, I remember.
The most shocking part of death was the time when images of people I care about came in front of me.
Why was it shocking? Expectations and reality mismatched, I guess.
You think about only those people that you really (really!!) care about.
And I warn you, it does throw up some serious surprises.
Weirdly, death wasn’t frightening. Disappointing, maybe.
It really didn’t matter to me that I was dying. What I was sorry about was that there was not even a single passion, or something that I really wanted in my life, that I could think of. Contrary to what I expected, none of my achievements in life meant anything at that moment.
All that mattered was the reason for existence.
It was plain sad that I had none.
Everything was so numb, so calm, and so serene.
Of course, my body panicked and resisted the unknown.
That’s when it happened. My mind shunned all thoughts.
In that struggle to stay alive, all my perceptions, views, beliefs, judgments and values faded away. Nothing mattered anymore. In that moment I acknowledged and gave in to the only truth in this world.
Everything is right.
It was all so painless. I had never thought that I wouldn’t be scared of death.
I realized, much to my amazement, that dying was not at all difficult. For a person who has no one in this world (no children to buy play-stations for, no wife to take out for shopping, no old-aged parents to attend to), death isn’t so hard.
Unfortunately, I don’t belong to that category.
It might sound like bullshit (and kinda arrogant) now, but it’s true.
Death, in itself, isn’t scary, responsibilities are!
When I think of all this sitting here, feeling safe (and very much alive), I know I’m quite lucky to survive. Not to forget the lessons death has taught me, something that life couldn’t (and something that, going by my standards, I’ll soon forget). It’s stupid that so much happened and all I could gather from all this is
You have to, somehow, survive this life; death, then, is the easier part.
As Mark Twain once observed:
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"-- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
