What does it mean?

What does it mean? And why is it a constant ache that refuses to go away? In fact, it chases you more mulishly than even your own shadow. On the zero shadow day, at noon, the shadow sure leaves you, but not this feel.

Poets have thought of it in various ways. In "Romeo and Juliet", love transcends it, while in the "Sonnets" by Shakespeare, it is art that trounces it and its twin, Time, that can defile beauty. "One short sleep past", and  "thou shalt die, Death", asserts Donne. It does not though.

It is not as if one is never separated from the diseased during her/his lifetime. Travel time and again takes one away. Anger arrests one at times. Such separations are flimsy though because they are truly temporary. Journeys end in reunions; Anger melts away faster than an ice-cream during the height of summer. One is, in brief, absolutely sure of a re-turn.    

Death hurts because such a  possibility is forever wiped out. It means a finality that is non-negotiable. One is never going to see, hear, touch the person. Never ever. That certainty is soul destroying. No amount of love, regret, supplications work in that dark, desolate dungeon which forever makes you a prisoner of grief, beyond bail.

You know that there are stages of grieving. Time is the only remedy, everyone tells you. True and false. Years disappear, but never that hurt. Well, the body may be just a piece of cloth that the soul discards. So say the religious texts. The soul, say the treatises, is re-born. But the body, however withered, is no longer the conduit to relate to it, right?

So beyond consolation is death. The final full stop is death. Each demise is sad. The worst, however, is parents' death coz the filial is the only relationship that can never be repeated, nor duplicated. So what does it mean, death? It is a wound that never heals. Tender is forever the scab. You do not need to worry it or pick at it. It is oozing eternally though we learn to bandage our emotions to go on with living!

pratima@"Be gentle/my heart hides still/wounds that never bleed": a take on Alexandra Vasiliu