it has begun

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  20

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,  25

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.  30

    (T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land, 1922)   

Thursday, 17 November 2011

I saw a rerun of Six Feet Under the other night. It didn’t come across as ground breaking as it did a decade ago but it was still a good watch. It was rather telling that what was shocking back then was not so shocking last night. But that is another conversation. What I want to talk about now is the coffin. Yes. The coffin.

Dave, the second Fisher son of Fishers & Sons, was attending to a grieving widow and was trying to assist her with making a choice of which “vessel” is appropriate for her late husband. She was too upset to make a choice, so Dave asked what car her late husband drove, BMW she said, the largest one possible, so he recommended a flash mahogany casket. He pointed at a picture in a fancy brochure. And there it was. Stunning. The pillow was lush and the lining, sheen. The casket was polished, dark, and sleek. Nine thousand dollars, he said.

Suddenly, I flash-backed to the day my Father passed away. Only moments after, in a haze of utter sorrow, I found myself in a badly lit smallish room, choosing a “vessel” for my Father’s last resting place. In my mind I had an idea of how it would look like. And I searched for it, asked about it. The man said, ah, we don’t have those ones, they are very expensive, and those ones with the top half opening are only found in movies (by that he meant not around here), but not here. What I had to choose from was an array of beautifully carved wooden boxes lined with what looked like metal. There’s that word. Wooden box. Certainly not a nine thousand dollar vessel. There was no pillow, satin sheet or lining. The lovely carvings on the outside did not try to disguise what was blatantly obvious on the inside. What’s the metal lining for? Ah. Death. Body. Father isn’t really here anymore, it is not really him that will be resting in there. And we must prepare for what is going to be. It was bare. It was brutal. The grieving had not even started yet. And the first of many smashes of reality had begun to strike. By the time Father was rested for the weeklong wake, the metal lining had been disguised with clean white cloth, lovingly pleated along the sides. I was relieved. But there is no forgetting what was underneath. And then the time came to close the casket, men with solder torches put another metal sheet over Father, and then proceeded to seal that in a blaze of sparks, before placing the “lid” and screwing it down along the edges by fastening its crucifix shaped pins. There it was, another metal sheet. I just this minute realized that we did not actually need all the metal lining because he was to be cremated. But that’s beside the point. The metal lining was part of the design, and it was so for a reason.

We all know we are going to die one day. But I think most of us, for the most times, forget. In a way, it is good that death isn’t dressed up in some societies. In other cultures death is often masked in beauty and order. And in some others, the process of dying is collectively denied, and people and families fall apart when the time arrived. One can argue how best to deal with death, or the process of dying. One can argue that such brute display of reality was cruel or traumatizing. And dwelling in the reality of death is not very productive. Or, one can say, that a shake like that is what everyone needs. So that one never forgets, that death is not an option you can consider, but a path everyone must take. And perhaps, this might force us to see and value not only life in a way we had not before, but the process of life and the journey of time in a different way. Life to me seems both limitless and limited.  It is limitless in what we can aspire, and in what we can do and achieve, but it is limited in the available time it can give us to do so. Sometimes we are too busy puffing ourselves up with one, and forget the other. Catching a glimpse of life at an end, made me re-think of my own, not in terms of point in time to live the moment for, or future point to arrive at, towards which everything is geared, but as a curve, continuous, up, and then down, and many shaped in between, to be taken as a different journey each time, each phase, with every transition not only an end to something, but also a beginning for something new. Perhaps even in death. But that, is also another conversation.