Man, interrupted!

Jesus, my favorite teacher of all times, called Death ‘a thief’ and ‘an everlasting punishment’; while Herodotus saw it as ‘a delightful hiding-place for weary man’! To Charles Mason death was “a psychosomatic” and last, & indeed least, Woody Allen referred to it as “an acquired trait” :-). To me, death was always a test. A test I never enjoyed standing for and one I usually fail upon. And those who died, those weaklings who gave unto death, I saw into two categories: those that I cried for and those I didn’t.

I don’t know if it’s because I started reading books at an early age, or saw death as the end of all my teenage misery …. or simply due to a birth defect. But death has never bothered me. [I have a ‘logical’ and ‘impersonal’ view of it. That it, sadly, is the lot of humanity and shit happens. So, yes, I do not usually cry on funerals. Sometimes I don’t even feel sorry for the dead. And I don’t know how to pretend]. But I dread-ed it! The way you dread the return of your boss from an extended vacation. Ever since the younger sister of the woman who lived with us, and brought up my little brother and sister as her own, for 21 years (through the kind of thick and thin not even our relatives would have stuck by our side through) died, death has been a stomach-churning inconvenience to me.

I ofcourse didn’t know the younger sister. Never met her, nor even knew she existed until the news came that one of Worqe’s sisters (there are about 8 of them, I believe) has kicked the bucket. I may have become gloomy and skeptical, upon hearing she was a mother of 5 at the age of 28, and may have observed how “history” or “this vicious circle” (of girls being given to marriages young) keeps repeating itself. I know I have felt sorry for Worqe who, due to a Varicose-veins problem, wasn’t able to mourn her loss among her family the proper way.

Nothing else!

So imagine my surprise and dismay when the minute we hit the church and were pointed to the right direction Worqe came running and fall on my chest! Lamenting the fact that her sister, who was never late to come visit her sickly elder, was finally delayed at her own funeral (the body was being brought from one of those cities at the outskirts of Addis where you need to walk for 4 hours to get to where transportation exists).

I have felt sad. I’ve wanted to cry. My mother and my aunts were certainly weeping in their respective “netelas”, audibly. But I couldn’t do it!! There was no fond memory that flashed in my mind to get the water works going, neither a sense of loss, or even a face. So I tapped her back conciliatorily, detached myself off the “Worqe & Co.” group and went to find a tree I can sit under the shade of: utterly and completely ashamed of my self!

Ever since then, I have viewed death as having an extra mission (aside the lot and the shit), of going around killing people simply to prove to the world what type of a person I ‘really’ am! That, contrary to appearances of kindness, thoughtfulness and generosity; I was a mean person with a cruel heart. A heart that would refuse a dead person a drop of tear!!

It’s something that keeps me awake at nights, this fear of how I’d react to death. I look at those friends and distant relatives whose closeness I value, and wonder what they’d see me as if [God forbid!!] somebody died in their family and I happened not to cry. How they could ever love me again, see me for what they thought I was or I feel I am again. Don’t laugh now, but there was even a time I prayed to Jehovah to either kill me or make me leave the country just so I won’t be present at another [tearless] funeral. Worries me sick, this fear, more than “their” loss and the kind of pain they would go through. [Yes, abesheet is self-centered]