Someone Died Today

Someone died today. It was a gruelling, grinding death. The scene played out in many long acts in a quiet part of a hospital in a quiet part of town. There was no comforting her, and the death was tucked away out of sight for the benefit of the living, tucked away to comfort us. So many die like this, out of sight and out of mind, and so many die with no friends or families around at all. We live with blinkers to avoid seeing the death that surrounds us. Reality knocks but we turn a deaf ear, it’s scent is everywhere, but our noses are burrowing in the troughs of worldly delights. The parting of the living and the dead is so frightening simply because it is the one truly democratic episode in everyone’s existence, it is utterly inevitable. We tend to see ourselves when we witness it, secretly hoping we get the ‘died peacefully in his/ her sleep’ obituary. There is no dying peacefully. It is always painful. It has been written that way. It is a sad thing but it is also a heartache we learn to live with and many of us learn to forget, but all too quickly sometimes. If we believe in the hereafter or not we can see in death a fullstop. If you don’t believe in an afterlife then that is the end of the book of life. If you do believe in an afterlife then the chapter has ended and a whole unknown section begins under the book of (after-) life. In either case, be careful what you write. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un – Indeed we belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.