Wow, how come you stopped us right in the middle of our climax of musing, leaving us with the rhetoric questions we will never be able to answer? Beautiful essay. Thanks for sharing your heart, your tragedies, hopes, with a glimpse of adulations and ovations for what we call life! Coincidentally, I just finished reading a short essay a friend sent to me this morning, deriving from the title of Daxin's work, "The Sky Gets Dark, Slowly," in which the author accentuates the ephemeralness of life and the gradual transformation from mortality to immortality. Yours is an empirical rendition of the same, painful, heart-wrenching as it may be! Let me console you right here with the words of some song we used to sing at such a time as this, never minding that I've forgotten much of the lyrics, "Cheeer up, my brother, live in the sunshine; we will understand it better by and by!"
Trust me, your story is our collective story - a universal truth of the existentially of death. The universal truth, however, pales in comparison to the customized "individualness" of it. Prof., I saw myself in your story. I truly did! I could say the same about my losses, and the truth is that in my own experience, the sting of losing any of my siblings often far outweighed the loss of my parents, and I have had my share of such tragic tales. The fraternal cord of having shared the same milk, the same bowl, the same space must have been instrumentally designed purposely to outmuscle the filial attachment to Papa and Mama. Nature seems to prepare us for our parents' disappearances from our spaces one day, even if reluctantly, but we are never, or at the very best, very much ill-prepared to imagine the demise of a sibling. Yet, death is the melancholic anticlimax of life, an experience every mortal must taste. When we are the ones to mourn, it's impact shakes us to our deepest foundations, but Shakespeare is right, "death is a necessary end that will come when it will come." And, whether we like it tor not, someone is got to mourn us someday, too; and it could be, paradoxically, one of our siblings!
Again, thanks for being generous in sharing your life and your pain with us. May your tears give us hope. And, if I may ask, Prof., how are you coping?
Michael
On Thursday, September 5, 2019, 11:59:54 PM CDT, Tunji Olaopa <tolaopa2003@gmail.com> wrote:
Burying another dear brother: Reflections on grief and death, by Tunji Olaopa
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