The Exit - Death

Death knows no calendar, and no one can predict it, nor can anyone escape from it with all his cunning and wit.

Each living thing has its own allotted span of life time.

Death is real and unavoidable. It is the only real thing in the midst of the unrealities of this world.

Everyone, rich or poor, king or beggar, young or old, healthy or diseased, has to pass through the trap door of death, whether one likes to do so or not.

One may live for a long or short period, for a hundred years or just a while; but one cannot live on eternally in one and the same life form which, in course of time, is sure to decay and become wearily burdensome.

" Neither kings nor beggars remain,

All go ; each one in his own time."

" All thy life thou hast bemoaned the death of others ; Why not sit for a while and ponder over thy own fate? "

Is death a painful process ?

The scriptures tell us of the excruciating pain that a dying person suffers at the time of death.

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In the Bhagwod Purana it is said that one experiences the horrors of death - pangs of pain as if one were bitten by a million scorpions at once.

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The holy Quran likens the throes of death to the condition of a person when a thorny hedge were pulled through the alimentary canal from one end to the other.

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The Sikh scriptures also speak in much the same strain:

" The life-currents are wrenched out."

All such statements are merely illustrative of the immensity of the torture that one may experience when the demons of death appear to forcibly take the spirit out of the body.

What actually happens at that time, it is only the dying man who knows.

No one, after the actual experience of terminal death, has ever returned from across the borders of the death land to tell us of the exact nature of his final sufferings.

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Each one suffers unto himself and becomes silent forever.

To be on the death bed is a veritable nailing on the cross, and the death chamber is a charnel house.

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One can scarcely stand unmoved when some people toss restlessly for days on end with a death-rattle in their throat, writhing in extreme agony on the death bed.

Who can understand the tortures of death ?

All stand helplessly by - the best of physicians, administering drugs to the last; the attendant nurses, walking on tip-toes; the nearest of kith and kin with tearful eyes, woebegone looks and somber faces, awaiting the inevitable end.

Who hears the piteous cries of the poor victim and of his life companions, his wife and children ?

" As the wife with hairs dishevelled moans her loss, the solitary spirit wings its way alone."

- Sant Kabir

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