A close relative of mine died last night. He was 82 and was suffering from heart ailment for more than a decade. I think his sheer confidence helped him live that long in spite of severity of the problems he had.
I was born and brought up in their house and spent good amount of my childhood days at their house. When I heard the news of his death I was able to keep my cool without really feeling sad. Frames of good old days and his personality rolled in front of my closed eyes.
By birth comes the death. Of late I have been thinking about what I would like to call “emotional debts”. The debts that are not related to money but related to human relations and emotions. When a near and dear one dies, beyond difficult days ahead due dependency issues for some, the amount of sadness that we will have is proportional to the relational or emotional debts that we have with the person who died. By emotional or relational debts I mean debts of nature “I should not done like that” or “I should have behaved better” or things of those nature. I think conscious effort in keeping the balance sheet clean will help us lead normal days without guilty feeling for years to come. One thing I think will help is to close our eyes and assume the scenario of the void created by demise of a near and dear one including ourselves and then think of the “debts” we have with them. The death as such may not scare us much (yes we will have some unfinished agendas which we would have liked to complete) but thinking of the void that we will leave and the relational debt is worrisome. Having entered operation theatre couple of times in life (fortunately with not life threating disease) so far all strange thoughts come to mind during that instant. It vividly showed my emotional or relational debts that I have with my wife, son,parents and so on. We will never see them in normal day-to-day scenario.
While some may say this is a solved problem and the solution is to leave everything and going to forest for meditation personally I don’t subscribe to that philosophy and would like to abide by the laws of the mother nature.
