When they die young…
My mind often wanders to old classmates , peers, friends of friends who died young. The thing with dying young is that as years pass, the only people who hang on to the memory of the departed are their parents. In my mind, i always imagine the mother clutching on to a sepia toned black and white picture of a toothy smiling child. I am not suggesting that parents of deceased children should not or do not move past their pain but the picture i draw is of their state of mind when they remember those who were gone too young, too soon.
When I think of these departed souls, I feel that in remembering them I am silently giving their parents company and some solace that their child does not lie entirely forgotten.Though, I do wonder if it plucks at the heartstrings of bereaved parents when they see friends of their late child’s go through the motions of life? Do they imagine a life where their child, who died at a meagre 15, actually grows up to be 30? Those parents ,who were at constant loggerheads with their difficult teenaged children, would have it worse. Maybe they feel that the vagrant they were raising at 15 would have had it together by the time he was 30, just like the lad next door.
Even as I write this a day after rakshabandhan, i recall a friend’s classmate who passed away on rakhi in 2002 at the green age of 15. I had never met the lad but the poignancy of the occassion was not lost on me. He didn’t even get around to take his 10th board exams. He did not feel the buildup to the D-day nor was his result berated or celebrated by his family. He didn’t experience heartbreak nor the exhilaration that comes with earning your own money. His parents did not get to see him go through the rigmarole of life.
Often, the elderly are quick to judge young victims of suicide, they are harsh and dismissive. It is so because when they retrospectively look back at life, they realise that a person somehow pulls it together near the end. They weren’t all happy times but it was a life worth living.
As years pass, friends forget their grief after all they are fighting their own battles. It’s just the mother who holds tightly to the yellowing picture, stuck in a time warp, while the seasons spin and change
