Separated by silence

Death so calm, so final, so reticent that even love cannot reach. I wonder what my brother’s final thoughts were as he lay dying? Did he think at all or did death overtake him with the speed of thought during that massive cardiac arrest? Did he make a desperate attempt to call his wife as she sat lost in the cricket highlights in the next room?

She saw him, face down in the folds of the bed clothes, rolled over from one side of the bed to another. He had gone, taking with him his depression, his pain, his life’s successes and failures. She was left with the child to be comforted, the urgent telephone calls to be made, a whole hereafter to be arranged for — the whole grammar of leave-taking in the lexicon of Death.

After the shock, I felt a little lonelier, the world larger and more distant. I knew that the loud guffaw, the healthy appetite, the quick flash of temper, the felicitous turn of phrase, above all, the happiness that shone from within has been lost for ever. I thought of his children, one far away and the other less than equipped to handle himself, and breathed a prayer on their behalf.

I was out of touch with him. Life’s little entanglements came in our way, mindless differences (coming to think of it now) that prevented us from opening up our hearts. I cannot forgive myself the trepidation that crept into our relationship and must have overshadowed his last days.

His death was so swift, stealthy and sudden that I was caught unawares. There will always be a regret for not bonding better. Our DNA matched even if our minds sometimes did not. I hope he forgives and understands. No love needs proof or reiteration. Love is in the blood. If life is a serenade, death is a nocturne. After my “rage against the dying of the light”, I could now understand what Arthur Golden’s Sakura said: “I began to feel that all the people I had ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away but continued live on inside me.” Go gently, my brother into the silence of the night. Tomorrow will be another day without you and there will be many tomorrows.