Fly on proud soul, you are free at last!

As a tenderfoot trying to understand death, I always thought it was somehow improper for caterwauling emotional great aunts, who were always nettlesome and garrulous in family re-unions, to one day, end up in a serendipitous coffin, unusually silent. The days, when I ran my fingers carefully over my baby-face to see if there were any signs of a moustache, and when I was growing incredibly restless to metamorphose into the inspirational man material my dad was, I had several revolutionary thoughts. I thought, I would burden upon myself to be the saviour of humanity when I became “big”, strive hard to find a medicine to cure death and give life to the way most stories I read always ended – “ … and lived happily ever after.”
As the pages in my life flapped by, my mental maturity grew pari passu with my moustache. This stage was marked by the demise of my grandfather, who always was, still is and will forever be my idol, whose mere memory never ceases to inspire and fill me with awe till this day. That night, when my grandpa rested on the laps of death, the following I wrote in my diary, with red eyes and a shaky hand – “Dear Thaatha, I am crying and groping in the dark, searching for your glorious bosom, I always found bliss burying my head into. Hours have gone by, I still am searching. Everyone say you are not there and you will not come back. But you have not gone anywhere, Thaatha. Your touch and smell is still clinging on to me, and will remain unaltered, for I have understood, the human heart is not just flesh, but something as brilliant as birth, as sublime as love, and as dark as death. The phase of brilliance and sublimity has expired along with you, and you have left me in transcendental darkness. But I am sure the darkness is ephemeral and our bond, eternal.” Trauma conquered my childhood ambition of curing death and in the course of a transition from mere fuzz to a pencil-line stache; I got a more realistic picture of death. Draconian, I thought, was the verity that it was only upto death to irrupt into the burden of old age and to ease the withering soul.
As time flew and stache grew, there were numerous deaths that numbed and shocked my heart, now entering teenage. My best friend’s dad, who was the genial best, a sharp-witted senior, a simple-hearted classmate, a vivacious junior, whose smiles and conversations I still treasure, and a teacher’s daughter, whose charisma, I admired, knew no bounds – all hurried out of my life and their own. Several questions, unanswered of course, erupted in my heart. Every death cavalcade I was part of, intensified my quest to form the right opinion about death. Several sleepless nights I spent, my mind lounging on what death left behind besides the body. During the course of an inquiry into myself, I found several answers. The grief of death lies not in the departure itself of the noble soul, but in the selfish realization that the departed has left us alone to fend for ourselves.
Who will I call again as Appa now?
Will I ever hear her voice again?
Will I ever look at his smiling face again?
How will I even live without her beside me?
Oh God!
It is here that we need to realize that it is our sensation of loss we are crying over, the void in our heart we are crying over, and not the life which lost itself. It is our feelings we are crying over, and not those of the departed.
Now I have learnt not to crib about death. Do we ever lament about the non-existent state of our loved ones before their birth? It’s the same non-existent state they have attained after death. They came, they lived, they left – nothing more, nothing less. But there is one thing that’s truly liberated – the soul from the prison of the body. I guess it is only something to be glad about. Fly on proud soul, you are free at last!