While my girlfriends are diligently learning in school, I’m eye to eye with an open cremation in the holy city of Varanasi. A burning human, only covered with some waferthin colorful cloths, does something to your mood. A ferocious confrontation with the finitude of human existence. I’m barely seven years old.
Together with my brothers, which are equally impressed, I’m looking at the smoldering bodies. Lying like unwrapped mummies on stacks of wood that has just been bought and carefully measured. Because also here holds, death is not for free.
Family members surround singing, mumbling and executing rituals guided by a hired priest. After that it’s waiting until the flames leave a little pile of bones and ashes. Patience is no superfluous luxury here. This proces can last up to four days.
In India, death is not a farewell.
In India, the birth land of my father, dead is no final farewell. Souls reincarnate, endlessly until you’re freed from your karma and you’ll never return. For my dad this earthly existence has no beginning or end. It’s like a never-ending wheel. If you’re not successful or don’t live the dream life you aspired… no panic. After this, you have numerous chances to blossom. I take a moment to allow this thought to sink in… Is that why I’m always in a hurry? To get from one point to the other? And on arrival wish for the next one? Like a dog chasing its own tail? Is that the reason I sometimes get overwhelmed by a deep disappointment. That now never seems enough. The exhausting eternal longing for more and better. Could it be that it’s because I have to get everything out of this scarce one-time life?
For my dad, this story works perfectly fine. The good man has an envious acquiescence hang over him like a veil. When I talk to him, there is no sense of time. At least for him…..
He never feels like he has to be somewhere else. Genuinely listening and inquisitive in full presence. In order to debunk all conclusions at the end of the conversation. Because nothing is sure, he says with a mysterious smile. Except incarnation… Thanks dad. That really helps. Right at the moment I feel some foothold, everything crumbles like a house of cards.
My mother is also no stranger when it comes to the theme of dying. Although not born in India but dead is a big part of her life. Her dad died when she was seventeen, after which she felt compelled to become a nurse. For years she worked as a death counselor at home, as a silent witness of numerous ways to go. Peacefully sleeping, old and young holding hands intricate, but also plain fights over the inheritance on the side of their incurably sick mother or father. Despite these variations of saying goodbye, there was something the repeatedly stood out for her. An experience of peace, a smile when blowing out the last breath. I’m hanging on her every word. What did she see? A white light, a description of an afterlife, known faces that await them?
My mom shakes her head. That we will never find out. No dying person ever came back with answers.
Is there life after death according to her? Just like my dad there appears to be no doubt about it. There’s nothing she can say about karma, but that there’s more is a given. Who knows, she might come back as a bird, fluttering over the city. Or as a cornflower, her favorite. Like leaves fall from the tree and serve as food for the earth, so will her soul contribute to something new. A hopeful image, whispers my mother softly.
Is death the end? Despite the savoring thought of returning, it provides me no certainty. The realization of dying does. Because even though reincationa and coming back as a bird or flower provides me no handhold, I know I will never return in this same body. That I will only experience this life once, as Anjali, with my daughter, family members and friends and the house that I live in. These words I write have already passed.
When I let this sink in, my heart fills with life. What happens after we die, we can only translate into concepts and stories. But to allow death, the moment of now, sheds a big light onto our current life. And that is enough for now.