She Held His Hand As He Drifted
She held her father's hand,
tendrils, with rivulets to her heart,
light, as his unwavering gaze,
a giant, but a tender child.
She turned to me with wet eyes,
and asked me if there was magic,
a prayer, a pledge, whether love
was what, would stop his gentle drift.
If she could transfer her flesh, the skin,
the blood, the cuticle - the caw, the maw,
the spittle, the shit - the breath, yes, her breath -
could she give him her hours, her being?
Could she put her love for me in a pill
and give it to him as a solitary dose -
I could lose you for him, my love,
and I know you will understand.
She collapsed in my arms,
her entreaties waiting for despatch,
as we together heard a machine giving
his fading breath a countdown.
The irrevocability of death is a given.
Even as I can't ever reconcile to it, I sit in awe at its messy discipline. It tears worlds asunder, leaves pain in its wake, splits, often destroys, but moves unreconciled and unrelenting. Sometimes it gives a little air, some space - not a dawn of hope, but a sunbeam - as a vestige, but then again moves across the firmament to find its west - and waste.
As we sit beside the hospital bed of a loved one, and pray, even if it’s for one more breath, deep inside we know it is against all natural laws. But hope is what we live on. I still remember the story of the Mughal king Babur, whose son Humayun was lying nearing death, and he went around his bed three times, praying to the almighty, for the exchange of life for life, to give his son's illness to him in exchange of Babur’s health, and it happened, his son was saved.
It’s a desperate thought for a despairing heart.
Just as death is really a passage through life, for the surviving - the bereaved, the ones left behind - death of a loved one is a transition, from a sensory world of togetherness to an estranged world of isolation. With a numb realisation we realise how much we are made, of what we get from those closest to us. Their demise then is like the opening of a yawning gap, something which often never fills again. It’s the absence of a voice, a touch, a quiet glance, a secret smile. It is the thinking together, it is the sharing of silences, of a bowl of soup, of seeing a sunbeam together. Of shivering in the cold, of finding warmth, of drinking coffee, of arguing, of hugging, of saying goodbye on the doorstep knowing, come evening and you would meet again.
And then all of a sudden, we realise how the absence of one life diminishes our whole world. Our accomplishments are not enough without the ardent cheerleader, our presence is not significant without that someone’s acknowledgment, a life we might be living in multiples is forever laid to rest as a lonely singularity.
A loved one's mortal body dies once, and we, the survivors, die multiple times inside.
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