Last night around 11.30pm
You started to head back home after a long day. Pretty sure, it ended as usual — you standing on top of the table, clapping, cheering and telling your team how great they were. Your team, looking up admirably at their director, feeding off your electric energy and relishing every word. Even reaching the car must have taken some time because of the many hugs and hi-fives on your way out.
You started driving, maybe thinking, as you have lately been on how you will return to a quiet house. Your 2 year old sleeping, busy after playing with the bright red car you got her. Just another day of not meeting daddy. Your wife nodding on the couch, waiting for you. The dishes laid on the table with food that had long lost its warmth. Finding those few extra seconds in the day was getting difficult yet losing the moments was becoming easy.
It must have been another regular day until you were about 15 minutes from your home. At around 12.10pm, a truck, trying to avoid a pedestrian swerved right and hit your car head on. You didn’t have a chance. The impact was strong, the force was vicious and in the crumpled car, you died. You died. At 12.11pm. Last night.
And here I am looking at you, lying silently on the ice slab. I find you oddly peaceful. There must have been no pain. Your body somehow escaped the cruelty of a head on collision. Your internals, unfortunately, were not so lucky.
The grief here is overwhelming. All your family is here as are your colleagues. They had no clue last night would be the last time they hugged you. There is a heaviness in the air yet, there are no loud cries. Just stunned disbelief and maybe, the occasional silent sob. This is the impact you had on our lives. We don’t know how to process your absence. We are just not used to it.
Your 2 year old is playing in the other room with the same bright, red car. She thinks it just another day of not meeting daddy. I can’t meet the eyes of your wife, our childhood friend. The last time I dared to look, she was staring into the abyss. I have no words to comfort her. Yes, I am speechless. I rarely am, as both of you constantly reminded me.
Long back, before you were a visionary director, you were just a struggling actor. Life was hard and yet there was a passion that made you never quit. You told me that you became an actor to experience different lives. You kindly reminded me that I will always be a boring lawyer in this lifetime. You on the other hand, just in last 6 months, were a doctor, an entrepreneur and the local drunkard. Actors are the ultimate empathy machines, you argued. They get to experience humanity at its best and at its worst. You had this ferocious curiosity about human life and the emotions that come with it. It amazed and perplexed me in equal measure.
A lot of us will be lucky to have lived fully in one lifetime. But in a short life, you lived many lifetimes. You understood life much better than most of us ever will and in your death you have somehow made us think about life and what it means to actually live it. You had the ferocious curiosity. All we can manage is a stunned silence.
