Day #33: Death (100 days of gratitude)

Day #33: Death
(100 days of gratitude)
I am grateful for death. 

You must be wondering what’s happened to this fellow. Death is a somber, dark, depressing, perhaps terrifying topic to most people. But it need not be so if you went a little deeper to understand it. Death signifies the end of one state and the beginning of another. The day dies to give way to the night. The night dies to give way to the new dawn. The caterpillar dies to make way for the butterfly to take wing. The freedom of bachelorhood dies to give way to the bonds of marriage. (Oops, hope she is not reading this). Death in one state may mean life in another state. Death is nature’s way of ensuring the dynamism of life.
Our Creator is also the Destroyer. What he creates in one dimension he destroys in another. A death of a loved one may mean that the loved one is now an angel looking back indulgently at us from above. Yesterday I attended a funeral of a 90-year-old man. He was my father’s cousin and we were all very very close when we were young. Most Sundays we will be at their house or they will be in ours.  The distance between Perambur and Royapettah was not so much in those days. Today that distance has grown so much that we hardly ever meet except in weddings and funerals.
I dropped everything to attend his funeral. He was a thorough gentleman, kind, loving and a very good host. He has taken care of his family for the last 6 decades and has been independent throughout without a single day of sickness. He passed away peacefully into the next dimension and we are not able to see, touch or interact with him anymore. But I’m sure he is now in greener pastures without failing health and weakness to trouble him.
Every day millions of cells die in our body and millions more are born. But when our time comes the new cells refuse to be born and the soul moves on to greener pastures. We are timeless eternal beings with a transient body that we drop when our time comes. We need to celebrate our time here on earth rather than mourn the loss of the departed when the time comes to move on. Send them off with gratitude and happiness for the time that they spent with us.
I’m grateful to the Grim Reaper for showing up as and when one's time is up. I’m grateful for death because it signifies the birth of a new beginning.
Life will not be the same without Death.

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