I don’t know about you but the death of anyone close to me evokes varying reflections on my life, and thoughts on my own mortality!
Even without personally knowing the person that passed away, hearing about them from people that know them well enough, can educe these personal reflections anchored on sorrow and the bitterness of death.
Death is a lot more bitter when the deceased is so young and so full of life like the young ones that passed away not too long ago. I didn’t know any of them personally but their passing touched something deep within me and I shared in the grief of those who know them!
You see, some tell us that death is a journey between the world of the living and the land of those who passed on.
Sadly, it is a journey that not many are exactly prepared for at the precise moment it begins.
Most of us don’t get to even say goodbye and shake left hands hoping to see again some day. Some say that some deceased persons could sense when it was their time to depart.
We think of our last interactions with the deceased and what they said to us or the last steps they took to see if they knew of their imminent departure.
We sometimes retrace these steps to try to make sense out of the journey as if there’s ever a good explanation for death.
It’s more painful when a loved one dies far away from home because there’s a certain finality to death that can make one despondent. A rupture. A certain premature ending.
The one that dies in a foreign land never gets to come home to create their last moments on this earth. If they do, they are already in the cold grip of death and those moments are of sorrow and what could have been.
Death is difficult to swallow when the dead never had a chance to fulfill their life fully in the eyes of the mere mortal.
Death is always painful but the younger the deceased, the harder it can be on their loved ones. I was in primary two when my seat-mate Saikou Badjie drowned at Jips ( that’s what we were told). It’s been decades but I still remember him in his khaki shorts and white shirt beside me in Mr Barrow’s class at SKPS.
The passing of people we know can sometimes lead us to contemplate our own mortality and life on this earth.
The fact that tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us. We all plan for tomorrow as if it is guaranteed.
The fact that even the end of today is not guaranteed to any of us can be sobering when one thinks of worldly affairs we stress and fight over. Is it worth all the hassle, the stealing, the greed, the lust for power, the slandering and spreading of calumnies?
We live, we grow and we die! Our friends and family cry over us and life goes on. Everyone speaks well of us after we are gone.
A lot of times, in our moment of need, we see very few of the people that are the “saddest” on our death. The world does not stop because we die. Even our burial is timed so things can keep moving. Makes you wonder; man, is it worth all the hassle? May Allah have mercy on the souls of our people that crossed over.
