Taming Death

I was waiting for the chill to go down my spine, to shake me, to render me immobile. I was waiting for the chill to numb my senses and paralyze me for a while. But it did not come – I was calm and composed. I felt light.

Michael Jackson was dead. But why was I not stunned?

It was an entirely different scenario when, in 1993, the death of River Phoenix sent chills into my system that left me restless and sleepless for weeks. The tragedy shook me so badly that I began to look at the world with even more cynical eyes. How could someone so young, so precious, die?

The years that came after that tragic event saw me slowly and painfully come to terms with the sad truth that eventually, all of us will have to bid adieu to this temporal world. That, ironic as it may sound, death is a part of life.

My introduction to death – and the pain that comes along with seeing and knowing someone dear is forever gone – came rather too soon and without warning in 1982. It was the seventh day of October, a Thursday, a fine day. It was the day my father died.

I was very young then, barely ten, and I did not know what to do. How was a care-free girl supposed to react? How was I supposed to grieve?

I was hurt and sad and mad. I was outraged. I was angry at my father for leaving us, and I was angry at God for taking him too soon. But when my fury finally ebbed, I began to ask myself questions: What would happen to my mom and my younger siblings? What would happen to me? 

When my young and weary mind got tired of asking, and when my badly bruised heart got tired of waiting for answers, I decided to just drop everything off. It’s just a bad dream, I told myself, tomorrow I’d wake up and everything would be back to normal.

But it was not a dream. So I floated on thin air, drifted, silently telling myself that my father was just somewhere far doing research. Someday, he would return. He would return. I refused to talk about him, not with friends, not with relatives. I silently clung to my belief that my father was not dead.

My growing up years were marked by two things: rebellion and denial. The former was strong and feverish, but the latter was undetected.

But looking back now, it was not really denial. Most of it was fear of death. How many morbid thoughts ran wild inside my nervous brain in high school? Countless. There were many afternoons that I found myself begging God and fervently hoping that I would see everyone in the family alive and well the moment I arrived from school. It was that dreadful thought, that dreadful feeling, that kept me on the edge throughout my adolescent years. Nobody knew, not even my mother, how badly the fear of death was torturing me. It was downright crazy, but there were times when I trembled over the deaths of people I hardly knew. Even the death of the most insignificant showbiz starlets affected me.

It has been twenty six years since my father’s frail heart decided to stop beating. Twenty six antsy years. The angry and confused kid is now an adult – though, at times, still angry and confused. The time that swiftly passed tested me really tough but made me learn and, to some extent, helped me tame my fear of death.

But have I really? Have I, finally, conquered the monster that haunted my youth? If I were to use my calm response to Michael Jackson’s death as a gauge, the answer is yes. Not that I no longer fear death – somehow, I still do – but I have stopped it from intimidating me.