On death

I have a very peculiar attitude towards death.

This will probably be a weird story. I’m healthy (I hope!) and happy (overall!) so musing about death on an ordinary Tuesday morning seems a bizarre thing to do. But why not? I’m just sticking to my habit of daily writing on Medium.

I’ve seen death in front of me only once. My wife’s grandmother passed away when she was ninety-four. She was one of the most amazing women I’d ever known. For one thing, she welcomed me wholeheartedly when I started dating her granddaughter, who was very young at the time (so young, I won’t even clarify in this story!). She hugged me on the first day she met me and said, “Take care of my dear Natasha!”. That aside, I stayed forever fascinated by how she’d reached her old page while staying totally independent physically and maintaining a very clear mind. She lived on her own in a town an hour outside of Moscow — she could’ve moved and lived with us or my wife’s family but she never liked Moscow, complaining of its polluted air. She wore heels and played piano. Every now and then my wife would bring her to our home in Moscow — she enjoyed our company but was always keen to go back to her place. During one of her stays in the early 2000s, I once stopped by her room. She was looking through some pictures. “Here I am with my girlfriend”, she said about one of them. The note on the back of the picture said 1928. I grabbed my head in bewilderment — I knew how old she was but doing some of the maths around her age was still mind-blowing. She was already thirty when the second world war started. Then…