I Am Not Afraid of Death
I am afraid of watching the people I love die.
It was an afternoon two months ago, when the impact of the coronavirus was just beginning to gain steam, that I received a text from a friend, “Dude, this pandemic situation is getting serious. My friend’s aunt died because of the virus. They couldn’t even find a place to treat her because all hospital beds were occupied.”
The sorry I felt for the death of a stranger’s aunt was quickly replaced by anxiety about death. Suddenly, the virus wasn’t a distant disease that happened to strangers or some statistic that I saw on the news. It was beginning to creep up in my backyard and the impact of the pandemic, moving forward, was only going to get more real for me and the people I love.
“Damn, this is scary. Sorry, for her loss though,” was all I could text in response. What do you say to people who have lost someone they know because of disease and chaos?
Before COVID-19 Death Was Neither Apparent Nor Distant
I have been curious about the nature of human existence ever since I was a child. This curiosity led me to devour many books on spiritual paths and philosophy. In Hinduism, every spiritual school of thought starts with accepting that death is the only thing that’s permanent. Everything else, our thoughts, our body, our material possessions wither away with time. The only thing that remains is the fact that this body has perished and our life force or our soul passes on. Many great yogis and mystics of India are instructed by their gurus to sit in burial sites or graveyards and contemplate on the temporary nature of the human existence. When you look at death from a philosophical as well as analytical perspective, these insights made complete sense to me. Like any other animal that is born and bred out of nature, human beings cannot escape death as their bodies fall apart and their minds weaken. However, at the time since death did not even feature on the outer circle of my connections, it seemed like just another fascinating theory.
The first time that death knocked on my family’s door was when my grandfather died of pneumonia in December of 2017. My granddad and my family lived in different cities and, growing up, I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him. However, I did see him a few days a year when he would spend a week or so in our house. His vastly different daily routine than mine ensured that we had less interaction. Despite this, I did eventually grow fond of his presence.
My granddad was put on the ventilator a few days before his death and was in a coma-like state when I said my last goodbye. A week later, he passed away. I remember crying for days at a stretch because I felt like I would never be able to see him again, even though we didn’t know each other that well. The logic of death and the perishable nature of human existence seemed to have jumped to the fore for me. Despite knowing this, I still couldn’t reconcile my granddad's death with that of nature’s law that I was aware of and researched about: everyone will die.
After this incident, I delved deeper into the topic of death. I started asking myself if I was afraid to die. I realized I wasn’t. When you’re dead, you can’t feel and there is no fear. Though I was afraid to die in pain and if I death did come knocking on my door again, I’d like to pass away without pain, in slumber, if possible. But the question that my granddad’s death brought up and that terrified me, even more, was what if someone I love dies before I do?
The Pandemic Has Caused Me to Scrutinize my Response to Death, Again
The question about someone I care about dying can build up a kind of anxiety I never knew I was capable of. How would I react if someone from my family dies? I could and can never find a conclusive answer to this question.
Whenever this particular death-related concern would usually crop up in my mind, I’d push it out and stop thinking about death altogether. But, because of the surge in deaths due to the global pandemic, I have been forced to open these death-related thoughts again; the ones that I had carefully and successfully brushed under the carpet of my mind.
There is no one answer that I find when thinking about these questions. I am petrified of losing the people I love, watching them die before I do. But, how would I cope with their deaths? Despite having death slowly knocking on doors of the people I know of, I still don’t know.
In the chaos of the pandemic stricken external world and my internal turmoil of death-related thoughts, I’m trying to do the only thing that’s in my control: disproportionately focus on keeping my family and friends healthy, ensuring that they have their vitamin D and multivitamin tablets on time, exercise indoors, do proning, and pranayama yogic lung exercises to keep their lungs ready for a viral war when the time comes.
A little about me…
I write on an odd range of topics: from mental health, self-care to politics, travel and comedy (and all the weird shades of genres in between). They call me a researcher in my day job.
Some of my thoughts:
- Have You Ever Felt Lost, Despite Having it All?
- “Positivity” Isn’t About Being Positive, It’s About Having Faith
- Three Things to NOT expect out of Meditation
I would love to read your thoughts and comments on what I write. You can contact me on Instagram at @thesanb and Twitter at @thesanchibhat.