A person I knew passed away this week.
Another person had called my attention to look at his online postings. He seemed sick, this other person said.
A series of prayers and expressions of gratitude filled his space online. Fruits, food and medicine were being delivered to him. These gifts and words of encouragement he accepted as enough to make him well.
In between those photos of food supplement, antitussive and vitamins, he was sharing the temperature readings from his thermometer. They were all low-grade fever.
This went on, I believe, until one morning, there was a selfie of him now fitted with tube connecting to an oxygen.
As fate and privilege would have it, a friend who is a doctor monitored his status in the local hospital. It was Friday he was admitted; by Saturday, the doctor attending to him had the word “critical” appended to his case. That same day, he had a heart attack. It was early evening when I called up a friend to tell him that I am using that prayer book to St. Joseph, which he shared with me. This friend then said, yes, I will pray for his recovery also.
By the time we finished our prayers, a message came from our doctor friend to tell us that he expired already.
I am using the word, expire, because the real direct word about death is always difficult to utter. In reality, our doctor friend used that word – died. But, as with many of us, we seldom use this word.
My narrative is not singular; in fact, for many of you reading this account, you might as well be partaking of the same experience when this virus hit your family or circle of acquaintances and friends.
Reading the word, “died,” makes you pause, not to think but merely to stop. That verb has a command that urges things, objects, and events to cease. An event is terminated; a process is concluded. Life, like a game, is over.
In an accident, which is another way to quick death, we do not stop breathing when the news reaches us. There is an immediate anger at the one who caused the death. There is someone—something to blame: a machine falling upon a person, a boat capsizing, the waves so big they swallowed everyone, a car running so fast and a driver who would not care even to stop.
Contrary to what we feel always that we cannot predict an accident, we can always cope with the senselessness of it, its total lack of foreboding, its absence of warning. The very speed by which life is snatched from a living entity when in the morning, this person was strong and in the pink of health is in itself a reason for us not to be allowed a denial. Accidents are accidents; they came with our birthrights.
With a debilitating disease, we are given much time to ponder about recovery, to be conscious of what we can do to the loved ones now suffering a particular ailment. Terminal afflictions, for all the sorrow they bring upon those actively observing the gradual weakening of a body, does not terminate our humanity, as we become stronger with hope and as we open ourselves to the imponderable, like miracles.
But death from a virus that appears to creep unseen around us, enters our body without our knowing it, with no sign that a pact between living and dying has already been sealed, is a different matter. We are learning to contend with it – the virus as the most personal emblem of this disease and the pandemic, which is the grand, monumental picture of how the human group has succumbed weak and defenseless before the phenomenon of contagion and contamination. But we do not learn.
Perhaps, learning is not even the appropriate word, but contending—how an individual in days can quickly move from coughing, breathing heavily, and then—intubated—wait for a death sentence. The medical persons can assure the patient that there are medicines and that they would do everything in their means. And yet, at a certain point, they would connect the person to tubes and, as those who had gone through this stage would say, fight for survival even as you remain suspended between losing your heartbeat and catching your breath.
Then death quickly comes. Forget the 14 or 15 days because they do not matter. Those are days when the fever goes unabated, when the headache comes and the coughing is incessant and mean, and the senses of taste and smell vanish. After this, there are only two ways to go: to recover or to die.
Not pass away, but, this time, to die. Then dreams go, and plans vanish. The house is left unattended. The flowers are left to decay; the books are surrendered to dust. The obligations are lifted. Your space in this world removed.
Those living take over. They begin their memories and tributes, their reminiscent always including their own graces and achievements with the person who has passed on. The words, eloquent, soaring and, strangely enough, never lapidary, for they are really for the living. The dead have no use for poetry and prose, come to think of it. We the living are the ones vetting our capacity to assure those who have gone on that we are able to remember, which is easy, and to love forever, which is most difficult.
We, in the saddest evolution of our human emotions, take it upon ourselves to try to continue the life of persons who have departed even though that would be cruelty to us, destined to either survive this pandemic, and continue living until our own stars have willed our passing.
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