29 October 2015

Here's what they don't tell you about cancer. They don't tell you about the wet, gurgling sound that mucous makes in the lungs of someone who is drowning in his own body. They don't tell you about the way flesh melts away until all that remains is gray skin stretched across a skeletal frame. They don't tell you about the tubes that carry black fluid from your loved one's wasted body.

They don't tell you that watching someone die of cancer is the same as watching someone's body destroy itself.

My uncle died on the twentieth of September at 3:47 a.m., and though this is a simple fact to remember, I found myself expecting to see him rounding the corner even as we made preparations for his funeral. In a sea of people whose world had crumbled around them, I felt curiously adrift; a mute observer whose chief agony found its source in the harsh cries of my aunt and the silent grief of a cousin two years my junior.

A true tragedy is one that destroys what could have been. Loss comes at the end of a life, in the twilight of an fulfilled existence that now draws to a close. Tragedy is the summation of vitality crushed beneath the ruin of memories and stories that will never exist, of dreams destroyed at the root, and of tasks left half-finished.

Ours is a culture that sensationalizes tragedy, plying it as a sales gimmick so often that we forget its true ramifications. It is well and good to read or write about a death, but until you have lived through one, you can't truly understand the full impact.

Death is a curious entity; true comprehension of its being drives one towards insanity, and in balancing on the edge of that precipice, one reaches adulthood. Only when one realizes the true fragility and worth of life can one truly live; only when one sees Death as something other than a storybook character can one grow up.

My childhood ended with a phone call at 3:49 on a rainy Sunday morning, and there are times when I can't remember what it was like to laugh in the face of our inevitable decay. I find that I am guilty of trivializing grief, of commercializing loss, and of romanticizing morbidity. I find that words, once clear and precise beneath my pen, cannot be combined in such a way as to convey the enormity of life's most defining trait - its end.

I have miles to go before I sleep, and many great deeds to accomplish before I set foot on the planks of that final ship. I think that adulthood comes with realizing that life is short, and means little if the legacy one leaves behind is not one of integrity, love, and kindness. And sometimes it takes a tragedy to remind us of this: that to live shall be an awfully big adventure.