Who’s Afraid of Death….

A couple of weeks ago, I buried one of my very close aunts who passed away due to health complications.

It was a death which hurt more than I could have imagined. All I could feel was grief and pain. No amount of logic and rational could soothe me in that moment.

All I felt was waves of hurt and anguish.

Death has a strange way of making everything come to a standstill. It’s a reminder that everything is finite and at any moment, it could disappear. I had always known this but my aunt’s passing away was a painful reminders of human mortality.

When I found out she had passed away, it felt like a bomb had dropped closed to home. It’s actually the perfect metaphor: Death drops bombs all over the place and when it finally hits closer to home, you assess the casualties of your inner circle.

But this isn’t the first time Death had hit so close to home.

In the mid 2000s, as a young adult, I saw what happens when Death drops its bomb in the vicinity of others.

I was staying with a foster family while I was in another country. It was barely a week after meeting one of their family friends when I found out that one of my foster dad’s friend was diagnosed with cancer.

It was terminal.

The doctors said he had about 6 months to live. The family all hoped and prayed that maybe, just maybe, he could make it out alive. A miracle was a long shot. But they all stayed hopeful.

Unfortunately, he passed away five months later.

A second “bomb” hit a bit closer to home. Before I started on my journey back to my home country, I was given notice of some really bad news.

That night, before I went to sleep, I could already feel something weird in the air. Something had happened and everything had changed for some reason. The next morning, I got the news:

One of my school friend’s dad had gotten into an accident while driving. He hadn’t survived the crash.

It was all so sudden. So abrupt. I just seen him some weeks before. The first thing that I thought about was his family and my friend from school.

That afternoon, we all drove to my friend’s home to pay our respects.

I still remember how it felt inside that household. The grief, the pain….. I remember his wife, sitting at the piano, playing and singing Christian songs with tears in her eyes.

Uttering the words “Condolences” or “I’m sorry for your loss” just didn’t seem to do enough justification. But it was all we could do to support their loss.

That was the second bomb death had dropped. It was so close to home.

Life ebbs and flows with Death passing through. That’s how the cycle goes.

There was a young lady who decided to volunteer in one of the countries in southern Africa. She was was girl whose family we had been neighbours with when I was living outside my home country. She was friendly, smart and all around, everyone had really high praise for me.

It was one afternoon that I was checking my Facebook feed when I saw all the comments left underneath a picture of her. All the comments were memorialising her.

I asked my foster mom what had happened. She told me that the young lady had gotten into a car accident during one of her volunteering trips. She had to be rushed to the hospital. Unfortunately, they didn’t reach the hospital in time and she passed away.

She was barely 20 years old.

It wasn’t fair. I started to question why God abruptly had taken someone like that away. Someone who had so much to give to the world….

I have given a lot of thought to my own mortality. During my worst depressive episodes, my mind would wander off to to dark places. I would feel emptiness. Thinking my own life had no meaning. Wanting to exit early and end the pain and torment.

But I had persevered and found enough reasons to keep living.

But Death always keeps its march. Dropping bombs whether it was in my vicinity or in other places.

When a friend, Akyaa passed away, I felt helpless. Knowing that someone was in pain and you can’t do much about it. It was like watching the death bomb blow up in your face and you not able to diffuse it in time.

A couple of years ago, that feeling of helplessness happened again on a trip, when a fellow traveller drowned on a scientific expedition.

I was watching them try to resuscitate him on the beach and not being able to do anything about it. I still think about it. Honestly, I don’t think I told anyone about it after I came back from the trip. It’a still hard to process.

The recent bombs involved two family members. My uncle who passed away and my close aunt last month.

My aunt felt like the heaviest casualty. Death had struck inside my household and the results were devastating.

Tears were shed and pain was felt. After the burial, it felt like closing a chapter. I went through emotions from pain, to anger and then relief.

Her memorial service was a chance to pause for a moment in time, contemplating my own mortality and reflecting on what death and family means.

The painful thing I know is that this will happen again. Death will come again and take away family from me. It will also take away close friends.

But I do not think about that in the present moment. All I can do is live life, enjoy all the moments that I can while they’re still alive. I do not want to live with the regret of not spending enough time with them or creating experiences with them.

With my aunt, I can say I spent as much time as I could with her. And I’m grateful for the time we had together before she passed on.

So who’s afraid of Death?

Not me. I do not fear death. But I fear the grief. I fear the heartache. I fear the relapse into depression. I fear the pain it comes with.

But even in fear, I know that I must embrace life, knowing that time is a precious commodity I cannot waste.