Amarajothy

 Of Death and Numbers

4/366

Ah the fourth instalment. On the fourth day of the twenty-fourth year. There are those who’d have us write this year as 2023A, avoiding the malediction of reciting the unlucky number 4. The sequence, in fact, is even more diabolical: 2-0-2-4 can be read in Cantonese as Easy Come, Easy Die.

And indeed death is on my mind. 

Just this afternoon I was sent a message announcing that one of my former classmates had passed on. Details emerged over the next couple of hours - a heart attack, a peaceful passing, gone at 58. He and I have not been close in the last 15 - 20 years but even so, he was my friend and his passing is a sharp reminder of my own mortality.

I think the first time I witnessed human life being snatched away was when I was perhaps 4 or 5 years old. I remember my father driving our family car and I think my mother sat with me in the back. We were stopped at a busy junction - well, as busy as traffic could get in the late 60s - a dusty road in front of us. There was a sudden commotion, a large lorry flashed across my field of view, going from right to left along the road, its image framed by the front windscreen. An unusual crashing noise I had never heard before, then a collective gasp of sorts, doors of neighbouring cars flung open, men rushing forward, my mum going ‘Oh!’, then an image of a young man’s body being carried past us - he wore a white shirt, I recall. Then a second body. 

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Don’t look’ my Mum said to me and as I lowered my head, I heard my Dad say ‘the lorry hit the bicycle…’

The hubbub settled and we were soon on our way again. But I shall never forget that vision of the white-shirted body of a young man, limp arms and legs dangling, being borne away by another man.

At about the same age, I was responsible for the death of one of our puppies. Our dog Rombo had given birth to a litter of pups and we’d kept one. One afternoon as I was watching the world go by from the front door of the house, I spied a cat sitting on a low concrete wall across the quiet road our house was on. ‘Ooosh, Rombo!’ I went, making the noise our dogs had come to learn to mean ‘Look! Something to chase!’. In an instant she too saw the cat and dashed down our driveway and across the road. The little puppy ran after her just as a car came up the road and the pup had no chance. Its life snatched away in an instant.

Some years later, I was reading the newspaper and came across a small article that caught my eye. Just a single paragraph, it said a young child had been electrocuted on a coin-operated kiddie-ride. The parents had placed him on it, put a coin in and a moment later, faulty wiring sent a charge through the machine and the body of the child, taking away his life instantly. 

I’ve thought about this many times over the years. Being a father of 3 and having also stuffed coins in countless kiddie rides over the years, I’ve often thought about those parents and how they came to terms with what had happened. One moment it was smiles and laughter and the next… darkness, despair?

When you’re young you feel immune from death. Youth is your vaccination against fear. And the absence of fear is the foundation of your sense of immortality. Life is laid out far ahead of you, its ending obscured by opportunities, challenges, experiences. Sure, we’ll all go someday. But not today. Not soon. And meanwhile I have stuff to do.

Then we age and we start losing friends and family and suddenly you realise that at some point it’ll be your turn.

I picked up Joan Didion’s book ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ in 2005. It is a book of mourning, written after the sudden passing of her husband, John Dunne. His death was as unexpected as it was traumatic. 'Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.’ she starts her book. Over the course of the year, she mourned, she grieved, she regretted  imagined scenarios. And she documented it all. Then just before the book was published in 2005, their daughter who had been unwell, passed on.

My Dad was diagnosed with cancer in January of 1988. Treatment was not possible and he died at home in April of the same year. Shortly before he left us all, he told the family priest ‘I can go any time. I am at peace.’ I was living in Australia at that time, making plans to come back and spend time with him. He couldn’t wait.  It took me many years to get over that.

Death is indeed on my mind. But so is Living. So let’s do more of that, I think.