Death Is Not a Face but a Raging Heart

Death is the ultimate unknown entity. Its mysterious shroud has blinded the exceptional prescience of novelists, illustrious scientists and profound men and women of the yesteryears. Seeing life beyond death is a prerogative of a dead man ― and that’s what makes him such a coveted being. People appear in numbers to mourn ― not his departure ― but the loss of a set of eyes that can see beyond the impenetrable fugue of death.

Unfortunately, in the perennial pursuit of sketching the face of death, we have been utterly negligent in grasping its raging heart. For what aggressively drives us to follow our wildest ambitions, and accelerate and refine our quotidian patterns is its frantic beating ― not its unimaginable visage. When death flutters in our face, its powdered wings rub together and produce an incessant and cantankerous chirping that coerces us to evict complacency and underachievement from our lives.

We eat text, splurge and religiously follow this lethargic loop, completely heedless to the purpose of our existence. Some of us don’t even have a bucket list. We just treat life as a lover who is so smitten with us that we are utterly sure that it would never leave us. And we take it for granted, every day. Incessantly. Unapologetically.

A drunken father, who himself believes that redemption is an unattainable luxury in the face of death, displays such valiant selflessness that he ends up salvaging some semblance of peace for himself in his dying moments.

So, does death condemn us to eternal damnation or elevate us to the ranks of paradise? I say that you’re asking the wrong question.

I was hopelessly in love with a girl from my neighborhood for 13 years. The day I arrived at her wedding procession, and saw her wed-locked to another guy, I felt overcome by despondency. I remember standing some paces outside the wedding hall, yearning for my inclusion in the dwindling population of city stars above me.

The subsequent weeks were spent deliberating on death. I sketched death in my numerous paintings. But I never understood what those sketches implied or if they were even my own property. They felt so foreign. But when I inked death, I stumbled upon my moment of clarity. I found this mini-version inside of me who was bone-tired and on his last legs. He became one of my fictional characters― and I, being the narrator, was plotting his death, instead of conjuring up his miraculous rescue. I felt like an oppressive tyrant when I started to see things from his vantage point.

And people might find it hard to accept this, but sympathy is a precursor of true empathy. We never really feel genuinely empathetic for a Palestinian kid unless we first feel sympathy for his tragic lifestyle.

And when you really are empathetic to someone, you try to understand him. You don’t just let him wallow in his sorrow. You actually make strides to help him evade the clutches of death. And if death becomes an inevitable fate for him, you try to redeem some life for him in his last moments. And that’s what I did for myself.

Death, like every destination, leaves a trail. In this trail a trove of secrets lays littered. Your focus should not be where the road ends. Your gaze should be consigned to the path. Only then can you use the realization of death to your advantage.

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