Life and Death
By Pritiparna Panda (2nd year, BT)
“Life is for the living,
Death is for the dead,
Let Life be like music
And death a note unsaid.”
How marvelous is the idea of life itself? Starting with a single cell, growing into a being, healthy and happy, formed of blood and sinew and all this inside another human! What follows is a series of tiny miracles
One often wonders about the purpose of life, we couldn’t possibly have been brought to the world only to educate ourselves, work a 9 to 5 job, grow old and then die. There is no sense in that, is there? So what is it that matters when your life comes full circle? Maybe God did not add another day in our life because we needed it, maybe He did so because someone out there needs us. The family that we are born into, the people that we meet aren’t in our lives because of a random coincidence. There is a reason for the crossing of our paths, the way we fit into these people’s lives like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle, the way they affect our lives and we affect theirs stands proof to that. So we go through our daily lives, meeting new people, collecting memories, some people becoming memories in the course of time. The good times and the rough patches, making and breaking us, each experience and struggle enriching and strengthening us, in a way we might not understand right away but emerging as new improved individuals nonetheless. More often than not, we fail to grasp the transience of all this.
As against the beautiful lie that Life is, Death is a painful truth. The finality of it is so surreal. Accepting the loss of a loved one is not easy, it’s much easier to fall into denial and pretend as if nothing has changed. The truth however does come to you, in the unlikeliest of times, knocking the wind out of you. Their once discreet habits becoming a treasured memory, now that they are no more. We look for their echoes in things that had once belonged to them, things that once they had touched. As they say you do not know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory. And how we yearn for a moment together with them again, a tight hug, a peck of affection, if only for short time only to let them know how much you love them, for a final goodbye.
You keep wondering how so much love and life in a person could vanish into nothingness. One moment they’re with you, alive and happy and whole and in the next they’re gone, never to return back to you. The idea of them having travelled to another world is beyond your comprehension.
“ The boundaries which divide Life from
Death are best shadowy and vague.
Who shall say where one ends and
Where the other begins. “
