The Arrival of Departure

Death never comes silently. It screams and shouts and makes all the noise it can. It tells you that its there in whatever ways it can. Death is never quiet. It makes itself known to you. You can feel it whenever it’s around. It is a funny feeling. A chill that leaves you warm or warmth that leaves you cold? You feel it enter your house through the main door; you feel it pass you by. You can feel its presence around you, weighing down on you. The atmosphere feels all charged up. You can almost lift your hand up and feel the intensity in the air around you with your very fingers.

Of course, you do not realize this till it has come and gone…taking someone along.

It is one robber that always leaves its prints and when the theft is complete you recognize the signs you missed.

I live with my family. My grandma lives with us too. Many years back my grandfather used to be the sixth member. He was taken gravely ill and he succumbed to cancer after two years of a brave struggle of the victim against the final victor.

I remember death. I saw it up close. The uneasiness was impossible to shrug off. It started the previous night. Something in me, either my heart or my mind, knew that something very bad was about to happen. It just did not know what. Departure of my grandfather was not even the last thing on my mind. It never struck me. But the beginning of the arrival of ‘it’ had begun and the departure was now due and in process. Nothing in this whole world could have halted it.

I felt that, me and my family, we were not alone in the house. There were many around us, with us that night, Angels of death or Fairies of relief. Whatever they were and whoever they were, they were here to relieve my grandfather from life, from soul and from the unbearable pain that he was, indeed, bearing.

I slept without sleeping that night and dreamt without dreaming. I woke up the next morning with tears in my eyes and my heart racing. I felt a feeling that day that I cannot even put into words. Does such a feeling even exist? Is there a word for it? A feeling of witnessing something, terrible or good, without the slightest idea or recollection of it. As if my soul knew but not my mind. As if only my soul controlled me and not my mind.

My father entered my room as I lay there with open eyes. My troubled eyes. He said, “Good Morning” and I said,”Where is he?”
First he told me that he is sleeping in his room and when I asked to be taken to him he told me that he had left. Left this world and us behind. Tears sprout out and my heart almost sprung out of its cage and I realized that I had known.

Death had come and gone…taking him along.