Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Death and Taxes

The cliché holds true I suppose. You can’t cheat them, delay one under a respirator, in a artificially induced heartbeat and drugs created by billion dollar companies. But you can’t escape it. You just can’t.

Death and taxes, the two old coots that have man since the beginning of life. Maybe the apple was the Creators internal revenue and Adam tried to snick a bite of it. That would of course change the course of human knowledge, It then be Taxes and Death. Hard to the ears when you say, not as smooth flowing but truth never was.

My brother-in-law passed away recently. He was around my age, robust and healthy one month and then taken in by some very malignant form of cancer that was being misdiagnosed as gastritis by our very knowledgeable Dr Houses around here. A month later he was a skeleton of a man. The first chemotherapy session zapped the will out of him.

My friend Antares say he has unsubbed from the three D’s, death being one. I must learn that art, the techniques required for it. For each time a death occurs it kicks me in the shin. For this death came on top of another, hardly a month earlier his uncle had passed on. The blow must have been harder for the mother to lose a brother and son in a month.

My wife was distraught, he was her only brother.

The week following his death was riddled with death too. A neighbor, first of all, buried now right next to him, a friend in Seremban, a friend in KL. An old class mate from the school days. Someone I had just met recently after a long, long time.

A mackle of deaths that numbed me to silence for a while, into morose contemplation, in sullen meditation just wanting to distance myself from reality, an attempt that never ever succeeds.

2 comments:

Starmandala said...

Interesting that you would mention my unsubscribing to the 3D illusion of Decay, Debt and Death. There are moments when I can happily contemplate living forever... and times when I would be quite happy to die immediately! In either case, the trick is to nullify the grimness and gravity of the grave - to laugh in the face of the unknown - we really don't have much choice. The alternative is to wallow in melancholy and moroseness and to see Life itself as a curse rather than a blessing. As a kid I occasionally allowed my thoughts to stray towards the inevitability of someday witnessing my parents' deaths - and I'd shudder at the horrible notion of never seeing Mum or Dad again. Ironically, after watching my mother endure five years of dialysis and being subject to other medical ignominies (with a meter running all the while which eventually enriched the medical profession by at least a quarter million ringgit - that's right, folks, not only do you pay death duties, you also get heavily taxed as you're dying!) I found myself encouraging her to let go, to allow the currents to take her from the pain and suffering of her bodily existence... I found myself promising her that she would be safe and well protected on the other side of the veil... and, thinking about it, I have served as Angel of Death for quite a number of people over the years! Often, all one requires is a little reassurance that all of it has been just a colorful drama, a fabulous movie indeed, but the REAL LIFE awaits outside the theatre. Indeed, it's like a show within a show within a show (or a trial within a trial :-)... What's evident is that when the Book Religions displaced Ancient Wisdom, they deprived humanity of any in-depth understanding of all the different dimensions in which Consciousness dwells - the only recent cultures that paid any attention at all to the scientific study of Death being the Egyptian and Tibetan; so it is to them that we must turn for some guidance to the realms that reside just beyond the EXIT.

Shakeel Abedi said...

I believe your words, my friend. It is not the death that had be down. It was the grief of the loved ones that I could do nothing alleviate.