I moved to Chennai around 5 years back for work and luckily (unfortunate for him?) got one of my college roommates to stay with me. The street had a dog that would occasionally get food from one of the houses. After a few weeks it gave birth to a puppy. The puppy was cute, white and had a noticeable black mark around it’s left eye making it more pretty. People along the streets would watch it in wonder as it strolls around and pat it sometimes. They would also feed it with a crumple of snacks they buy along to their room.

One day the puppy somehow managed to reach the service roads along the corridor of the main road and it seemed a car or truck rammed on it in the morning. The puppy was small and just had it skin teared out with intestines laying upon on the road. Someone seemed to have moved it to the farther end. Nobody cared and they just made sure their vehicle just didn’t touch it and moved along in sideways. To add more to that in the evening someone again seemed to have rammed on it again and the body was now totally fleshless with only a fur of skin flat and filled with dust.

All the love and joy that little puppy shared around just evaporated in a moment and all that is now left is a disgruntled memory about it’s body. There could have been places the puppy could have went and people it shared moments with but in a flash it’s no more. To be little more honest the same chances of it occurring to me or the other person I see across the street are more or less the same. Though humans have better access to medical facilities and so on theoretically the chances of death are almost the same.

The other thing about death is that it has a rippling effect on others lives too. As much as the joy brought in creation of life to others it leaves upon the same (or more amount) of sadness when death ensues. It increases even more when someone dies young since it makes their loved ones think about all the things that they could have done. Sometimes it even takes a lot of years before someone gets to accept the fact of death to move on. It’s one of the reasons where things like war, epidemic diseases, etc. leave a long term dent in a lot of lives indirectly collectively adding up the impact of death of a single person.

Just like the puppy that could have had a life, all the things that I delay now for the future that lies in uncertainty is also reduces the probability of actually getting to that point. It just doesn’t stop with me I have to also watch my parents age. Small scars or injuries that used to cure quickly in the past now take up time as a fact of ageing. Just as they have to be more careful they watch me age as well on trying to cope up with these things. Sadly, this is not one of the facts that were taught about and something a person has to cope up with on their own personal terms.

The thing that made me write about this is that I saw another couple of puppies yesterday that were playing along. They were at a hospital that opened up near my house. The security guard bought them a couple of biscuits and they snuggled around his legs with a tiny scream. As much death takes it all away it doesn’t really stop us from making moments that we know will just be memories someday. Maybe that’s a great quality of love and kindness that I need to value more and more along with also knowing the fact I am treading down the path filled with uncertainty.

It’s not the first time I am writing about death and for some reason I tend to get to it once a year .

Reopens when breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi