Ignatius Raphael - cosmic traveller

Day #95:     Passing away of a loved one (100 Day gratitude challenge) This month on 26 th December my sister lost her husband (just 57 yrs old) and their sons lost a father, I lost a brother-in-law and we all lost a family member who has been with us for close to 30 years. It was sudden – a heart attack and a flesh-and-bone person who was amongst us celebrating Christmas the previous day was no more in this world and has moved on during his sleep. This man was one amongst us in our Christmas get-together the previous day, talking, laughing, eating, and participating in the family discussions. The next morning he was gone. The connection to life is so tenuous that we never know when our time will come or the time of a loved one will show up. We take for granted that we will be around for a long time and people we love and care about will still be with us and we can make our mistakes now and later we can correct them. But sometimes the later is not there. And t...

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 w...