The Inevitability and Certainty of Death

We have no control over the two most important events in our lives…our birth and our death. Though some people may have the ability to preside over the time and manner of their death, no one can stop death. If we have no free will when it comes to being born and the fact of dying, then aren’t we just passengers moving along a line laid down by time, spanning the distance between birth and death, without the ability to alter this pre-determined journey to our eventual demise, irrespective of whether the path is straight or crooked.

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When someone we know dies, we respond in different ways, depending on how far removed or not we are from that person. Deaths of parents of friends typically invoke platitudes that these days take the form of “folded hand” emojis and statements, such as “RIP”, or “may you stay strong” or “may God give you the courage to get through this”, usually on platforms like WhatsApp, often copy-pasted or pre-configured as short-cuts on our phones. Deaths of immediate family members are more difficult to handle, depending on our proximity to that person, while deaths of friends and colleagues affect us sometimes even more personally, because they also make us suddenly aware of our own mortality and eventual fate.

When people above the age of 80 or 90 die, we grieve, but it is a loss tinged with the acceptance of a life generally well-lived, where our parent or family member or friend has had the opportunity to experience most of what life generally throws at people within a seven to nine decade lifespan and is a loss often easier to handle, if expected, due to chronic illness or frailty. And often, while we express our regret at the death, we also ask or remark, “I hope it was a good death”, implying that hopefully the person did not suffer much.

When someone young dies, it’s tougher, because that life has been cut short before the ability to fully experience all that a long lifespan offers, though if you ask those who are aware of their imminent deaths when young, say as part of a chronic illness or non-responding malignancy, there will be regret, but they will often talk about how the depth of experience is more important than the length and and breadth.

But when someone our age, someone we know, in their fifties or early sixties dies, it is different for us. We still consider ourselves young. While we’ve gone through the grind in our 30s and 40s and now are a bit more relaxed, we still either have a bucket-list of things to do and places to visit or we want to spend more time trying to unravel the mysteries of life and/or hope to see our children become parents so that we can hold our grandchildren in our hands…or we may want or hope for a combination of these or all of these.

We are too old to rock-n-roll and too young to die…in Jethro Tull’s words.

That friend and colleague who has just passed away may not be your closest. But to lose someone who you have known for over three to four decades or perhaps more and shared smokes and jokes and alcohol with, is never easy. Seeing them laid down on the floor, clothed in white, cotton in the nostrils and bedecked with proffered flowers, shakes our bodies and minds, sometimes without rational explanation, even when as doctors, many of us are used to seeing death on a regular basis.

The loss we grieve, is not only for the person who had so much more to offer the world, or for the family who will take years to come to terms with the passing, but also for ourselves as we come face to face with our own mortality, knowing that sooner or later, we are also going to be lying down on a similar floor, perhaps with a different set of flowers and clothes…a fact that most of us are unwilling to come to terms with at this stage in our lives.

So, we all land up dealing with this in our own way; by internalizing, or externalizing, some in denial, some staying away, some wanting to be around, some turning to religion, some hoping in their belief of an after-life that their souls will get to a better place, and some who believe there is nothing more than this one life, hoping to live it as best as possible…all of us though believing that we still have some control over our lives, in what I more and more realize is a predominantly deterministic world. There is no right or wrong or good or bad in how we deal with the trauma of loss of life…

…but deal we must, consciously or subconsciously, and eventually figure out how to reach some level of acceptance, because the inevitable truth is that death will happen around us more and more often…and eventually come for us, too.

And if that is the case, then we owe it to ourselves, with whatever free-will we may seem to have, to make the most of this life, by making ourselves relevant, even if it is to just one person in this world, and by finding purpose, if we haven’t yet done so and doing everything possible to not fall sick and even if we do, to try and not become burdens to those around us and society at large.

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