Death, so be not proud

I lost my mother a few months ago to illness still undefined. To me, it was as if she was still alive, lying there as the pundit chanted incomprehensible prayers that echoed in the cool morning air at the crematorium. I hated every moment of what was being done, to her, to my father, to me, to us as a family that we were no longer. But Papa, bless the wise gentleman that he is, had a take on the situation that, even today, blankets me in a certain eerie calm when I get brave enough to pull the horrors of those rituals out of the little box that locks them into my mind. He said, very truly, “She isn’t there any more”, so how can she feel or know what is going on?

Death is something that cannot be reversed, cannot be stopped after that critical turning point is reached. It happened just yesterday to Pramod Mahajan, and it will happen again to everyone who lives. And once it does, is what is done to that which remains of the individual really important? There is no longer the person within the body - the one who laughed, talked, cried and shared life and living with a special group of friends, of family, of professional contacts. It is only a mass of cells, of tissues, left behind for doctors to examine, loved ones to wash and dress and the fire to burn or nature to consume.

Watch CSI on television or read the novels of Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs. These tell you in unforgiving detail, all graphically described, how a body denatures after death, how the process of decomposition gradually fulfils the universal destiny of “dust to dust”. You read and watch the way in which a bullet tears through skin, muscle, blood vessels and destroys what was once a living being. And you ‘see’, in various astonishingly gory TV shows, how disease invades and then kills what is a breathing, laughing, healthy human body.

There is no pride after death. You have people who have never known you washing your naked body, cutting into it, sewing it up again. You have to lie there as hordes walk past, displaying a grief and reverence they don’t really feel or understand. And you have fire eating through the soft feet, the slim waist and the beautiful face that once gave you and all those who saw you so much pleasure. But then, as my wise and wonderful father said, you are no longer there to be proud…