It’s funny, I guess, how we can never find out if this is the last time we are meeting someone. It’s not just funny, it’s something saddening too. You know what else gives you that same ambivalent feeling? Your electricity bill. You’d be surprised, even stuck, by how bad it is, and wonder if it could possibly get any worse than this.
Yes, it can.
Well, apart from that piece of paper which can give anybody a heart attack, there’s another kind of paper that gives life its endless euphoria, money. In some people’s lives, it’s like the blood that needs to be pumped through the body. I believe some don’t even realize what influence this paper truly holds over them, that if it were ever curtailed from their life, the oxygen itself would seem to deplete. As if one student’s absence could shut down an entire school, as though nothing else held any importance close to it.
We all set a priority list for our lives, an order, a pattern, which we believe, once acted upon, will set our life right. Each goal completed takes us one step closer to some pivotal point, the bigger picture, which then shapes itself into the daily to-do list of each life. This to-do list actually reveals a lot about a person. You don’t even need to read someone’s journal to know them. It reflects, to a great extent, who a human being really is.
If someone can’t tell you who he is through his life, perhaps his to-do list can. Is it just a string of headings? Does it carry any formatting, any expression at all? Are they complete sentences, or just jumbled fragments? Is it something done half-heartedly, or does it actually hold weight? Was there any personalization in it, any image of a life being lived?
As I said, some people don’t indulge in too much verbosity in life. They just want to move forward, to do the next thing, to face whatever comes. And then there are others, who would treat even making a to-do list as a task of its own, who would love to leave their imprint on everything they touch.
For some people, the workday begins with the list of today and ends with the listing for tomorrow. There is a pattern here, an order, a journey toward something perpetually in progress. It will lead us somewhere, and when life becomes a continuation like this, the fear that settles into the bone is twofold: that this path might not lead us astray, but that it might also not lead us anywhere at all.
We never realize the exact point at which our actions begin to react within us, when the very things we preached, demanded, idolized; get buried under this heap of worry, regret, imposter syndrome, apprehension, missed opportunity, lost words, and so much more.
At times, the air itself seems to change composition, less oxygen, less carbon dioxide, less nitrogen, and more of fear, baggage, and burden. And the days seem to pass like the blurred moisture of a cold dawn, the kind you can never quite tell is fog or snow. It just comes, comes every day, slipping past just beyond our understanding. And so the days keep passing, each one taking a piece of us with it as it goes.
This is just the agony of life, the kind that makes us believe we are heading toward no destination at all, only a painful death, an excruciating end, an iceberg waiting to take down this entire Titanic. It will leave behind aching memories, where some cells of the soul will still be playing music, trying to make peace with those very last moments, while others will simply make a fiasco out of this whole farce.
Sometimes we devote so much time thinking about life, about death, and still remain the most ill-informed about either. We also ignore the strange feeling that perhaps, if we go looking for death too closely, it finds us all the easier. It is when we are buried beneath all this weight and baggage that we start believing our pain, our suffering, is the entire world’s suffering, that this is all the fate and destiny there is. That belief alone could be the death of us. One incident in my life once tried to teach me this lesson, not through someone I knew, not through someone I had ever met or worked with, but through someone who taught me simply by becoming absent from this world.
The truth is, if death wants to come, it will appear the very next moment and end it all. You don’t need to spend an eternity planning how to fight it, or even how to live alongside it. You don’t live death. That’s the one thing it doesn’t allow. It only takes life AWAY from you, makes you LIVE NO MORE. So even if you were the one told you have two months left, you still couldn’t say for certain whether you would outlive a friend in death, whether they might die in some sudden accident before your own planned one ever arrives. Their unplannedness simply walks all over your planned death suitcase.
So what do you do with your death suitcase? It holds all your preparations, your parting fears, your phobias. Drop them, drop whatever you’ve packed into it. You could spend all your thought on how you might want to die, how it might feel, which moments you’d want to remember and which to forget. You might even dedicate time to truly feel the pain of those final moments in advance, all the regrets that have covered an entire life, just to make sure that when you finally die, you’ve already done the due diligence of regretting beforehand.
Then all your preparation, your entire suitcase, is left behind, because you see someone else go before you, with an empty one.
The news of her death. That she died in the utter youth of her life. Just a week before, a few weeks before, I had been talking to her, asking for her help with a course, and she had explained it to me patiently. I could hear the vigor in her voice, the zeal of someone who knew exactly how different she was from where she came from. I could sense the different life of hers, the kind of thinking that could make a person stand out in any crowd.
But before her intelligence could ever make her stand out, she stood out with the news of her death instead. The sudden death. Her sudden death.
That is when you realize, your fully prepared suitcase is perhaps no guarantee at all that you will die before someone whose suitcase was completely empty. They are still here, and perhaps you are not. Someone else is simply gone, because even when you think you’ve seen death coming, you still can’t tell if you are the unluckiest person alive to know your own ending in advance, or if someone else is unluckier still, for having died before you, without any warning at all.
With all of that, you would never get to know if the end of a phone call is really the end of the words you’ll ever exchange with that person, because their life, unknown to you, is about to end. Or perhaps the moment they walk out of your house, the goodbye you couldn’t quite get right, is the last time you’ll ever see them alive. The news of death doesn’t shock you much because you barely knew the person, but because you simply didn’t expect them to die. To die like this. To die like that. To die now, right now, without any warning at all.
Just when you thought you were the one preparing to step inside the coffin, imagining how the world might look from inside it, how the people digging the grave might appear to you from down there, it turns out the places have exchanged themselves. And you are the one standing at the edge of a grave, looking in. Not from the inside, out.
One can never know when it is the last time they are greeting someone. The last time they are saying goodbye.
And perhaps that is the only certainty death ever gives us, that we never know we are saying it for the last time.
