Monday morning

Monday morning. You wake up from one of those twisting and turning nights, filled with these bizarre dreams that signal that the dawn ahead has something installed for you. You don’t quite realize the consequence of those dreams, because they’re dreams and they might be bullshitting you, like they do most of the times. But this particular Monday, the dreams weren’t lying. They transformed into prophets of doom.

This ill-fated Monday morning, I had wished to wake up with a smile and a new beginning. Instead I received a crack-of-dawn phone call; you know that when you receive one of such calls, that something bad has happened, but you just don’t know what. A familiar voice at the other end of the line bade me good morning, asked me how I was, and then delivered the bad news. A death. A family death. An expected family death. But still, a death.

Struggling with an impeding depression, and having spent quite a good deal how to prevent it, hearing about these news only came to enhance the numbness and hollowness inside. Words have no significance in such moments. No matter how many condolences and comfort you try to offer, no matter how sorry you say you are, no matter how grieved or kind you appear to be, it really bears no significance in those moments. All words sound like words of the wind, which are fleeting and of no consequence. Still, you say them. Not because is only expected of you, but because it is your only way of forming the feeling of sadness into a social shape.

Giving out condolences is a dreary thing. Feeling them is another. This Monday morning the word ‘my condolences’ came to take another meaning; it came to represent not only the loss for the soul which had just departed this vain planet but also the loss of all the other souls which have to bear a silent pain from now on, and who have to struggle to carry on, with the grief and their memories.

This Monday did not start as it was planned. No one prepares you for death. Even when you expect it, the sharpness of its coming, does stay with you. I don’t know exactly what happens to the soul once it departs from the human body, but I’d like to think that for this particular soul, it has gone somewhere peaceful, where it could suffer no more with all these vain human illnesses that have withered its flesh for so many decades.

May this soul rest in peace, in all sense and meaning, and may all the living souls that are left behind, garner the strength and the will to endure…

For a great warrior…an uncle!