Illness and Death in the Universe

The morgue attendant guided me to my mother’s lifeless body residing inside a black bag at the hospital where she was pronounced dead. The coldness of the morgue was not only measurable in degrees of temperature but also felt with the heaviness of unsaid words during farewells. I glanced around the room to discover that in the seemingly perennial emptiness and intolerable silence, there were many more bags being filled with someone else’s parents, children, or grandparents. The unyielding grip of death annihilated the possibility that this was part of a movie scene or the bewilderment of waking up from a bad dream. To make things worse, a fly landed on my mother’s forehead while the staff member unzipped the bag. I felt trivial and lonely. Watching the fly moving across my mother’s face only amplified the gloom. The only certainty of that moment: my life and my view of the essence of life would never be the same. The emotional resilience and spirituality hardwired into my neuronal circuits and pruned during my lifetime struggles were immediately depleted by grief.