The Fragrance of Death
“Let me live as long as life sounds music to my soul
And let me die when death invites me to its banquet.”
(From morning musings)
My best half is slightly sensitive to some intense fragrances. Quite a few of my favourite perfumes have failed to get the approval of her olfactory senses. Once when the sweet aroma of frankincense and myrrh wafted from a new bottle of oil I brought home, she said that it made her reminisce about death — about houses fumigated with frankincense resins to mark the arrival of death.
“It’s one of the beautiful fragrances with which we honour the dead,” I protested.
The conversation gradually slid into a reflection on death and how beautiful and fragrant it can be.
I reminded her of a tradition of the Prophet Mohammed which said the death of righteous people would be officiated by bright-faced angels descending from heaven with divine perfume and shroud.
She replied God would customize His honouring of the dead by sending to them their favourite perfumes, the way He custom-made our body and psyche.
If death is such a beautiful occasion where you are honoured and felicitated, it cannot be something that scares your life out of you. In that case, the idiom ‘frighten someone to death’ should be replaced with ‘soothe someone to death’, I wryly suggested.
Death is not so much a departure as an arrival
The news of a birth cheers us up, while that of a death unnerves us. We celebrate the former despite the desperate crying with which newborns come to this world, but we mourn the latter despite the great relief blossoming on the face of people lying dead.
When someone is born, we are happy to welcome a new member to the global human family — the exploding club of world population, in economic parlance. But when someone dies, we are sad that she departs us, conveniently forgetting the fact that she has joined another larger club — of people (read it souls) who are in the next phase of their existence.
We are used to taking death as a departure, ignoring the fact that it is also an arrival for those who die. If birth is the natural process of entering the earthly stage of life, death is equally a natural process of entering the next phase of it. We feel sad that someone is no longer with us and there is nothing unusual about that; however, the news that someone has arrived at her destination is rather comforting than disturbing.
In our language, the word death and its derivatives, as well as metaphors extracted from it, denote a sense of loss, failure, and gloom, while birth is hailed as an accomplishment, victory, and source of delight. We say people have succumbed to their illness when they die, but we say they have ‘survived’ when they are cured. We assume we die when we are not strong and bold enough to fight against death. That is why we often feel pity for those who die. We consider them as victims of death.
We are influenced by the notion that the closer we get to death, the weaker and the more deteriorated we become. We consider death as the enemy of our health, youth and vitality, and we are afraid of our enoxorebale progression to ruin and decay. This fear makes us hide all signs of ageing and weakness.
But death is not a monster on the prowl looking to subjugate and conquer us, nor is it a vicious trap we helplessly walk into. We can rather consider it as an honour the way we treat life as an honour and blessing. Death is an entry pass to enter the next phase of our existence. When someone dies, she is being blessed or is getting qualified to enter there. That is why suicide is an attempt to gatecrash and sneak in where you are not invited.
But the pain of death, be it natural or accidental, is not much different from the pang of birth. Like moms suffering from acute pain in exchange for being blessed with motherhood, we endure some pain while going through the process of entering the next level of our existence. The nominal entry fee is justified if you are really excited about what is out there beyond the pristine valley of death. According to a tradition of the Prophet Mohammed, the soul of a righteous person is extracted as easily as water comes out from a pitcher; the angels of death welcome her to the pleasure and mercy of God.
Death is that station of quietude and pleasure where tranquil souls find solace.
Consummation of life
Death is an approval — eternity’s seal on the completion of our earthly mission. Even murder is not horrible when we think from the victim’s perspective whom death could take to a more blessed and more gifted sphere of existence.
That is why murder is a stupid and senseless choice for doing away with your enemy. When you murder someone, you are elevating her status and facilitating her entry to a better life. Even when we execute murderers, we are helping them to get away from a painful life haunted by an endless spiral of sins. When a court punishes a murderer, justice is being granted to the relatives of the victim; it’s also a pre-emptive punishment to prevent further murders in society. But, the victim has reached a level where she is no longer bothered about what punishment is meted out to the killers.
When someone dies, we lose a dear one; but for those who die death is an opportunity. It’s the inevitable consummation of life. They have reached the destination for which they were living, something which was necessitated by their births. Unlike any other objectives and destinations we weave for our life, death is something we cannot evade or flee from. Every soul is supposed to taste it, the Quran says.
By reflecting on death, we can come to terms with certain realities of our existence which we tend to miss while enjoying life by taking the magic and miracles that life plays within us for granted. We often ignore them considering them as a permanent feature of our existence, being unaware of some of the essential features concerning who we are, where we come from and where we are heading to. But we forget that whatever we enjoy came our way as part of a package of life, and when the package expires the whole thing will lose its effect.
Journey and destination
God says in the Quran that He has created death and life in order to assess our performance. It’s not by sheer accidence that while pairing the words death (mouth) and life (hayat) He started with the former, while He is actually talking about the latter. In this deliberate choice of words, there is a clear indication that life is interwoven and intertwined with death.
Life cannot be conceived without death, as it is the impending death that lends meaning and direction to life. If life is the journey, death is the destination, or it is at least the entry point to the destination.
Your destination is set before you set off the journey. You start the journey because a destination is already there. It captivates you and inspires you to continue the journey, no matter how difficult and challenging a terrain you have to traverse before reaching there. The more you reflect on death, the clearer will become life’s meaning to you. The more you know about death, the lighter and less enigmatic will become your life.
When you talk about a journey or trip, you mostly refer to it by its destination. In the absence of a destination, your trip might lose its overall sense of purpose and direction. Death lends to life a clear sense of purpose like a destination gives our life a clear goal. When we get excited about the destination, life will also become a thrilling experience. When the beautiful panoramic views down the idyllic valley of death awaits you, you can forget about the debilitating fatigue and exhaustion of the trip. No amount of challenges will weaken the spirit of a traveller who visualises paradise as the final destination.
The Quran describes them as winners, as blessed are their journey and destination.
But those who are uncertain about the destination or think that their destination will be a hell-like rut, this travel does not make any sense, however exciting it might look like.
They should not have set off the journey in the first place, had they come to know that their destination is such a horrible place. They are not travelling to the beautiful valley of death but are climbing up to the edge of a precipice overlooking the quagmire of hell. They are worried they would fall off it. For them, both the journey and the destination end up as a disaster. As the Quran says they are the losers, and accursed are their journey and destination. That is indeed an absolute disaster.
By mentioning death before life, God reminds us of the destination where our life culminates. The destination is especially important as what we call life is the duration between birth and death. God wants to remind us that our life has a clear purpose to serve, but the duration to achieve that purpose is not open-ended.
It’s also like talking about the duration of the exam before you take it. You cannot attend an exam without being aware of the time when you have to finish and hand over the answer sheets to the examiner. This awareness will make you structure your time and spend it effectively. You cannot sit idle in an exam hall after obtaining the questions.
You don’t have ample time so that you can write your answers taking your own sweet time and finish it off at your own pace. The value of our life will be evaluated by what we make of it within the stipulated time, as the value of our examination is measured by what we fill our the answer sheets with.
Has death an edge over life?
Our life is something that began at one point in time and place and will end at another point in time and place. The time existed before our birth and will continue to exist after our death. The duration of life between birth and death is a small speck in the ocean of time stretching far and wide beyond us.
There was a time when nobody talked about us as we did not exist then, and there will be a time when we will cease to exist, and people would gradually forget about us. When we take the time in its totality, the duration when we live is short compared to the time, stretching endlessly before and after it. If death denotes a state of not being alive or our disappearance from this world, we were in a state of death before our birth and will be returning to that state after our death. It means death or the state of being non-existent precedes our birth as it follows our breathing our last.
But after death, there will be plenty of proofs to demonstrate that we existed once. Our accomplishments, our legacies and whatever we leave behind will talk about our lives. Even people who lead a less accomplished or uncelebrated life will die after leaving some sort of imprints. We exist in the memories of people who saw us or lived with us, and our progenies will inherit not only our legacies but also some of our physical traits. And for those who believe in the hereafter, death is not the cessation of life, but the beginning of another phase. Technically, death or non-existence is something that precedes life rather than what follows it.
We are of Eternity and will return to Etenrity. Death welcomes us to the Eternity with divine fragrances which will be wafted all through our soul’s heavenly route to its abode.
