Death Is Love Is Death

By Shaunak Bakshi

None can dodge the inevitable embrace of death. It seems to be an unjust albeit necessary feature of existence- all that is born, must die. Be it at the end of a life well spent or a tragedy for someone in their prime, in the end the soul is reaped. What belongs to the spiritual plane ultimately returns to it. Quite anticlimactic, if you ask me. We already know that a hundred years from now we will be nothing but ash and dirt. But even when dead, each of us is made of something beautiful. Stardust. But most people either don’t realize it or don’t give it much significance. That’s where they falter.

Death, the epitome of impartiality. It is the only thing that truly and equally cares about each of us. It doesn’t discriminate between the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the wicked and the decent. It is the ultimate justice for a life that was ours to shape in the brief moment of consciousness we attained, and we may circumstantially consider it to be a punishment or a blessing, but it just is. It doesn’t care about our social status, religion or sexuality. It is preordained. Everything has a date of origin, and comes to an end at some point. Just like love.

Love and death are more alike than people like to admit. More accurately, they refuse to dwell much on the similarities, because most of them spend their entire lives searching for the true meaning of love and finding a person who makes them feel all those things. To even consider death and love in the same realm of existence may take the magic out of it, and god knows people need something to believe in, to believe in the magic of a feeling. But there is a reason why the most celebrated romance sagas like Romeo and Juliet are the most tragic, ending with death, don’t they?

“Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.”

Because death is love. In death we are set adrift, following the currents of the afterlife with no way to navigate. Love is the same, a chemical reaction in the brain we have no control over. As the grim reaper’s weapon of choice is a scythe, the devil of love uses an arrow and a knife. Where death is the end of the mortal vessel our soul inhabited, and the commencement of our eternal existence on a plane invisible to mortal beings, love is the end of our existence prior to it, and a new journey begins from that point. All we need in life is closure, and only death gives that to us.

As we grow older, we know more and more dead people. If the average life could be represented via a graph, there would be a certain, definite age beyond which our list of living acquaintances is largely surpassed by the deceased we knew. Those ghosts never leave our vicinity, ever present, just beyond our sight, because as long as we remember them, they stay. And that is a good thing. Because we don’t want to be immortal, we want to be immortalized. We don’t want unlimited power, we just want our actions to matter. And it is we who carry the torch forward for our fallen loved ones. We cannot forget the time we spent with them, and the faintest memory of a smile can bring a battering ram worth of nostalgia. The heart wants what it wants, doesn’t it? And if all it wants is to think about the ones who are lost, and the brain wants to believe that keeping them alive in memory means they are an eternal companion of ours, well, there’s nothing like it, is there?

But here is the thing. Oblivion is imminent. It cannot be stopped, just like the expansion of the universe cannot be halted. The dead deserve to be remembered, but every new generation forgets just a little part of them, something they deem less relevant, and soon each person is wiped from memory. What they don’t deserve is pity. Each of us is in the end to be married to death forever, so why pity those who took the plunge before us? Death is, after all, not the end of the ride. It is a change of worlds. Believe that the souls that left us behind have gone to a world far better than ours, that death did them a service.

“Oblivion isn’t scary; it’s the closest thing to genuine absolution of sin that I can imagine.”

By Shaunak Bakshi