Thursday, December 08, 2005

Mnemosyne

The Wait

Now that I've figured out the functions of the various Blogger icons on my 14-inch monitor and squandered time away--it's been three days since I logged on to my blog--let me begin at an end. This dark tapestry of thoughts is about death, more like waiting for it.
Three weeks back, my maternal uncle was diagnosed with both lung and bone cancer. In a chest X-ray of his, which I happened to see, there was nothing but a dark swirl where his left lung was supposed to be. The cancer had spread from his lungs to his bones, nibbled away at the disc on which our head rests and also rendered his spinal cord hollow. This man, who's now about 70, has been more like a grandfather and a friend to me (we both used to bum smokes from each other, share both good Scotch and sweet brandy and so on). I still remember how he once rendered my irate college principal, who once decided that he should have a talk with his ward's guardian about my general misdemeanours, absolutely speechless. His reply to the principal's rants was, "He's 19. If he doesn't bunk classes and chase women now, when will he do all this?"

When I went to meet him last week, he was lying on the bed. Physically, he looked OK, but I could sense his spirit had been squashed. I sat next to him, held his hand and chatted with his children. They were putting on a brave face and wanted his last days (the doctors say he doesn't have much time) to be anything but gloomy. His little grandchildren shrieked around the two-storeyed house and there was good food on the table.

But I could also sense that dispassionate, cold presence--in the hall, around his loving children, in the little garden outside. Most of all, I could see death's shadow shuffling silently behind my uncle.

It is not the finality that hit me, we all know we have to poof! some day, but it is the waiting that is agonising. A voracious reader, he's stopped reading the papers and seldom switches the TV on. All he does is wait, like we do at the ATM, at the train station and for our next raise.
It could end in three months or eight, but it's finally, incontrovertibly going to happen. It's so close, he can probably smell it.

Life mostly is all hype, great fodder for the evil men behind advertising. But death, ah, there's nothing at all like it.

6 comments:

sac said...

i guess all of us use life's million distractions to delay thinking about the inevitable.. till it's in our face and shows them for what they are..

sac said...

btw, turn on Word Verification in your settings, else you'll sooner or later attract spam comments..

and listen, why does your post share your blog name..

MKM said...

thanks for the word verif thing,
O. Maximus, and think ill take some more time to figure out the settings

A and A said...

Bad enough it happens to all of us sooner later...having to wait for it must be worse...

Ostrich said...

It's true, death is a bigger stimulant than life. If we thought we were never going to die, a lot of us wouldn't get anything done.
It's tough watching someone you love go. La Tristessa Durera.

Tartrazina said...

facing the same thing with my best friend's ma... hate feeling hopeless.