Fierce pajamas

My Grandfather and the Sociology of Death

 

ये मेरे ख़्वाबों की दुनिया नहीं सही लेकिन,

अब आ गया हूँ

तोह दो दिन कयाम करता चलूँ |

हुज़ूर आपका भी एहतराम करता चलूँ;

इधर से गुज़रा था सोचा सलाम करता चलूँ …

There is nothing more exhausting than that moment in our lives when time is, by events far out of our control, alternatively accelerated and sedated; accelerated by the fervent and constant pursuit of hope, and sedated by its continual, piercing, catastrophic rejection.

I have led the last couple of weeks in such a ghostly aura, where my academic interest has often, noisily, jostled with other emotions that have formed a part of these events. What follows is bound to be an unsuccessful disentanglement of these two separate but singularly painful experiences.

Grandfather died yesterday. Or was it the day before? I’m not quite sure. It wasn’t the day before that, for he had held my hand, squeezed it, winked his left eye in the same fashion as he had since the time when I had arrived in this world; he had opened his eye and heart for me that day, swimming wildly as he had been in that noxious cocktail of death and infection, life and antibiotics; he had nodded and shook his eyebrows, and we had spoken more in this primitive exchange of symbols and of our souls than we had done before. In those few minutes between being granted visitation rights (into that little room that brought the other-world so close to me) and before the guard on duty arrived all grim and dutiful to lead me—the condemned—back to life, my grandfather and I experienced the full force of living, love and attachment. He had the fascinating and uncommon ability to transform the quotidian into the pleasant, and to convert the circadian rhythm of his daily existence into a beat that seemed, to me, forever, continually, and seductively, inviting. It had been true for a long time, that beat, and it remained then.

I had never seen him like this: the vast accoutrement of beeps and graphs that suffuse that room for “Intensive Care” struggled to dissuade me from a series of items in which I had convinced myself into believing for a very long time: the eternality of his life, his constant company, the exhilarating pleasures of encountering daily living in singularly fascinating ways, the intriguingly cheerful persona. Three of these, I’m happy to report, have triumphed over the decrepitude of tubes, machines and drugs that sustained living in that place of his final days. Life, for him, was always out there, to be lived on terms devised on one’s own, never outside some preset boundaries, but never in the death grasp of the modern purveyors of longevity. My grandfather had, long, long before the invasion of intensive care and that cornucopia of Colestin and albumin, ceased to give in. He had been waiting, it seemed to me, patiently, cheerfully, longingly, in that middle, dusky zone that marks the space between worlds, waiting in line, so as to speak, to move on.

Which is why I don’t know when and how he died, though I know well how he lived. I know they took his eyes, beginning with the winking wonder first, for I had to be there when they did it—a procedure of charity. And that will endure for a while, elsewhere, for its life has been transplanted, anonymously, while the rest of his physical attributes have withered away, into dust, settling down as I write this, in a locker somewhere in a crematorium.

But what then? Where does this go; where does it take us?

The last few days have been achingly tiring for all of us involved with this checkered game, because it has been a rollercoaster ride into hope and despair, a tale of momentary triumphs over death and the inevitable direction of life. But beyond philosophy and medicine, this has also been an interesting time sociologically. The sociology of death, as I call it, seeps like everything else, into the life of the living. It attempts to help us deal with the deafening silence of this interim, where memories haven’t quite as yet faded around the edges, where the noise of my grandfather still rings in my ears, where the photographs haven’t quite lost the tales of their real setting, and where stories haven’t quite yet evolved—often concocted—to give birth to a new aura, a new man. The sociology of caring and routinely dealing with the quotidian aspect of death that hospitals encounter every moment is severely juxtaposed with the sociology of shock and loss, despair and finality that families and friends must deal with “when the time comes”. Ritually, the two cannot but be different. Neither must the severity of this difference between the two allow them to violently wipe each other out, as matter and anti-matter. But the two can help me answer, somewhere surely at least understand, how to deal with this.

We took his body home after they took my grandfather’s eyes and handed me his death certificate. No dues, they said; but what dues can there be for a body in a shroud, destined for an urn in a few hours, bound for the Ganges? Anyway, I made fifteen copies of the death-sheet, duly stamped, for this will be the tool to endure my grandmother’s days in this world. Words floated by, people and tears blocked his house as I arrived, somebody gasped. The ritual of filling the space, of helping me deal with my question had begun.

We are fascinating creatures, for we have devised a brilliant method of dealing with the violent rush of emotions that death brings in its wake. Where vigils dammed my soul with hope and payers, the passing away of my grandfather burst that dam, flooding my mind with memories and just that. Somewhere I think the former is superiorly stronger, for hope has a power unparalleled when it is alive. Memories are more enduring, for they also serve the useful purpose of creating a form of solidarity which binds atomized souls that death has scattered. Food and prayer, shoulders to cry on, chambers to collectively make a pilgrimage to, a photograph with a flower garland somewhere in the corner, incense sticks and a collective murmuring of the memory of a now new, saintly figure. These are a few stars in the vast constellation of the sociology of death. They usually tend in the direction of an idealized memory, one that is as much to remember new specific things, as it is in the service of forgetting. There are old compadres and young admirers, fellow travelers and ancient helpers here. There are those who cry easily here; there are those who see no reasons to shed a tear. But there are many in between, unsure of their reactions, unsure of their audience. My grandfather was long gone for me, for I had seen them take his eyes away; but the new aura of his life, together with a new memorial hastily constructed, will now be a work in progress, filled each moment. And that will prolong a life that even death will fail to take with it.

There is something of this in Kundera, where he talks about Nietzsche’s idea of ‘eternal return’. Equating the unbearable idea of lightness with disappearance, finality, inconsequence, and meaninglessness, and contrasting these with the idea of eternal recurrence of an event or personality, Kundera suggests that it is in the latter, in its process of creation, that death is given a new life, a new weightiness, one not necessarily resembling its ‘real’ model. This is the ‘aura of nostalgia’. While that which is transitory and ephemeral is necessarily resistant to a final verdict, the idea of eternal return, of the creation of a ‘solid mass’ of memory is sociologically invaluable, for it seals, signs, and delivers on that which has passed away, never to return. It is for this that memorializing my grandfather is important these days, for it is by this that his erstwhile reality will be insured against ‘becoming lighter than feathers’. If his life is not to recur again then it reveals a profound moral chasm—a process of fatalistic, necessary forgetting—and it is against this that the sociology of death seeks to work, weighing down with something, anything, the memory (and reality) of my dead grandfather. There is also that other terrifying aspect of disbelief, for death has a sort of feather-like quality to itself, that only the rituals of the coming days will seek to ground in reality.

For many of us, this is enough. The struggles of our own lives, the paucity of energy, the inability or unwillingness to dwell, ensure a swift burial for despair. It is exhumed at times, to be sure, like a dog ferreting out a bone from the ground somewhere. But what about those of us who continually wonder? What happens to a man winking even as sedatives flood his mind; what happens to the heart that finds joy amongst beeping machines as it listens to Ghalib on a little music player, even as death is hours away? Condemned as we are, eternally to his memory, the sociology of death fails me in dealing with my grandfather’s death. There was no memorializing by me in that place, no partaking of that ritual that helps us to forget and remember anew. There is pain where there was hope; there is remembrance where there was pleasant life. There are tears in his company where there were mostly smiles. But the smiles are still not far away.

There will be further functions for this process of memorializing. I understand it now, though I’m not in it. Photographs have become the new catalysts, bursting the remainder of my dammed heart. There will be exclamations of disbelief, of shock and despair, of pity and compassion. Big words, these are, and will bring more, for death is also big business. Money will be spent, brandished, excavated, redistributed, quibbled upon, redirected, recovered, offered. But my answer remains. What now? Eternal return or condemned, final reality? Is there another way, or must we forever follow Parmenides into his world of pairs of opposites? My religion doesn’t help me, for I don’t read it or understand what the holy men say. They just say, adding to the deathly aura of this new life.

Building solidarity and memorializing, bonding and recommending ourselves, remembering and forgetting, looking out for appropriate audiences and offering suitably sanctioned reactions, grounding death and lightness with a new weight in reality: these are important aspects of the sociology of death. It is a process of intense interest to me, even as I cannot extricate myself completely from its process and grasp. It is tied, interwoven, with the memory of my grandfather, with his remembrance, with association of my daily life with his, with our pursuits of familiar interests and passions. In all these, he emerges. For me, his sickness was the terminal stage of his stay in that intermediate zone between worlds; it was a sort of excuse, a ruse to exit from the scene. He, foremost, knew somewhere, somewhere deep yet fathomable, of his own mortality and its approaching arrival. And there was a calm acceptance of this fact in him—tempered by the onerous task he had performed his entire life, of bidding adieu in this world to all his siblings—that saddened me, wizened me, shocked me, and confounded me.

My grandfather was a kind, generous, connoisseur of the world. His end, while not spectacular as his life, was swift, and he continued to project to me that warm sense of a wonderful something, via Ghalib, a squeezing hand, and his winking left eye. For living, these can be nearly enough.

गुज़रो  जो  बाघ  से तो  दुआ  मांगते  चलो,

जिसमे  खिले  हैं  फूल

वोह  डाली  हरी  रहे |

बदला  ना  अपने  आपको, जो  थे  वही  रहे …

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