Every time I attend cremation of loved ones, I become one more inch introvert than before. The feeling is spellbound.
Today was one such day. Dead man’s son asked me: ” You knew my father for at least last 20 years. Person like him is gone. I cannot believe it. Perfect routine. Perfect food habits. Always ready to learn and re-learn. Peaceful nature. No anger, no kama and no greed. At 68, no diabetes, no cholestoral and no BP! But he is gone! And there are so many of us, imperfect and sick, still here!”
I did not reply him. May be, he will read this later.
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My dear friend,
Death and disease are not at all related. Death’s mathematics does its task governed solely by चित्रगुप्त’s probabilities, irreverent in the face of medical attempts at prevention, diagnosis and treatment. What appears as cruelly unjust, chaotic and disorderly at the individual and family level, is but a part of the impartial, fully just, greater order.
Death emerges not as some accidental, unfortunate, macabre freak of Nature, but as a pristine, vital and co-ordinated function.
Mankind fears disease and dreads death – an attitude promoted over the centuries by medical men.
Purpose of Medical science is not to prevent death but to sustain living life to the level that each individual performs its karma based on dharma.
We hardly now know dharma and karma. And so we fear death.
Conception onwards through embryogenesis, fetal growth, birth, milestones, puberty, sexual maturity and decline, reading glasses and arthritis are all a part of more or less precisely timed trajectory (4 Ashrams : ब्रह्मचर्य,गृहस्थ,वानप्रस्थ,संस्यास) .
If configuration is precisely timed, so is disfiguration so that you have repetitive statistics of heart attacks, cancer and stroke, with their age-distributions spanning from one end of the lifespan to another.
Dobzhansky[1], the Harvard biologist, calls all stages of human existence as continuing development, whose climactic acme is death. Death is but a step in development, resulting, as some would like to put, in the next birth.
Our job, being parents of future generation, is to gift them perfect or near to perfect timed trajectory so that they can complete 100 and all karma associated with each Ashram.
Till then, celebrate death, as much like we celebrate birth. Death is indeed a birth. Think about it. अंतिम संस्कार for this life so that new cycle of संस्कार begin, all based on चित्रगुप्त’s diary, all based on how you act during these cycles of birth and death.
[1] Dobzhansky T. Mankind Evolving. New Haven and London: Yale Univ Press; 1962
