I have always thought about death. Imagined it, fantasied about it but till recently, it has never been so close. Of course there is physical proximity. People die every few times a year and hold a funeral under at the apartment void deck so technically it's been close to home but still out of reach. Just like that awesome BMW parked at the carpark.

Things got a little more serious when I got to YEP (Youth Empowerment Programme) in India. Within the first few week, one of the editors of the Chyk magazine, who lived in Chennai, had passed away. He was in his thirties. The people who knew him at the course were in mourning and Swamiji discussed it for the next few weeks whenever we would go meet him. Re-incarnation always always came into the picture and it was emphasised that The Body had died and not the Immortal Soul. The editorial which was written for him also reminded readers about this. To me it felt like a cop-out. A belief system, though somewhat logical and internally consistent, developed to make sense of such a radical occurrence. I could go into an analysis, but not now.

I recall the recent death of my paternal grandmother. I was heading for a night out with my buddies when my mom called to break the news. “Come home NOW, Aaji has passed away”. Initially, there was no reaction. It was just a slight inconvenience, having to drop off, take another bus and go home. Then slowly, it starting to sink in. I put the person into context. Who was she, what was my relationship to her? What memories do I have of her? Keep in mind that I'm not consciously following a problem solving plan, these are the thoughts that are popping in my head. Now obviously, I have answers to those questions but like what happens in an interview, you start to put vague ideas into a context. Now at the end of that sequence, you have a gap then its followed by this punctuation mark called death.

You have this vacuum feeling in your heart. Sometimes, it feels painful and you want to cry but this time it was just a vacuum, a bit of a painful emptiness. So I tried to get the details filled in. How did she die? What now? What will you guys be doing about it? Slowly the picture gets clearer and the feeling reduces in intensity. Yet it still lingers. In your mind, you have this timeline of everyone. It often starts when you first meet the person and ends when you last met the person. Everything before and after is a kind of extrapolation you construct. When someone dies, the timeline concludes. Full stop.

Its like a train. You know that it is moving forward even when you are not looking at it. You run into this train when you meet those people. After your meeting, you still know the train is running. When someone dies, you might have thought that the train was still running, until the news gets to you. I'm not sure what causes what, the fact that you thought the train was running when it was not that makes you sad or the sorrow makes you look at the situation this way. Then you are also reminded that the train is not going to start running again. Its just going to stay the way it is.

The next stage was reflecting what my own death would be like. I could die from an accident, a disease, old age, or (highly improbably) disappear into thin air. Or wait, I could be killed for whatever reason too. Once you cover all the different options, it gets more predictable and less scarier. I would want to be smiling when I die, it think it will look good in the pictures. Ideally, I would love some cheerful person to be in charge of my funeral. Someone strong on the inside, I have met a few people like that but there's no guarantee they'll be around then. I especially, especially want a nice message read out, something like Dawkins, “to be read at my funeral”. I think it helps everyone to re-align their vision and look at death, and life in the right context. I also thought of the ways I could end up. Being buried (though highly unlikely), as a pile of ashes (somewhat likely) or even on the dissection table in the anatomy hall. There you go, it isn't so bad now is it?

Your response to death partly depends on what you think is going to happen to you after you die and who you really are. Both interrelated. A lot of people, at least intellectually, feel that they are some spirit occupying a body which they will discard upon death. This helps them cope when other people die. It's an explanation they always bring up when someone in the family dies and its a perception which persists long after the funeral. Yet, almost no one treats themselves and others like that when they are alive. Rarely do people treat others as if they are souls temporarily occupying these physical vessels. We are all practically philosophical materialists and treat people as bodies so its odd when people think you are weird because you explicitly admit you are one.

Bhaja Govindam, a hymn composed by Adi Shankaracharya, an influential philosopher of medieval India, has a stanza which goes, “Repeated birth, repeated death, repeatedly resting in the mother's womb. | This Samsaara is difficult to cross, Save me, out of your infinite mercy, Oh Krishna”. After expounding on this, Swami Mitrananda left us with a rhetorical question. What meaning would life have without reincarnation (or an afterlife)? That hit me hard, unnecessarily. It was a question I had pondered before and I had found a reasonable answer. Yet, because an authority figure had dished it out, it swallowed it. Talk of instinct. I think what really makes it matter is the present moment.

Nothing much in the future is certain. I keep in mind that I could easily die while crossing the road in spite of my precautions. Does that mean that it's no point going to medical school because you might only get your MBBS after five year? Yes. There is no point, assuming of course that what you are looking for is just a piece of paper or being able to write “Dr” beside your name. There is so much more to be gained at every step of your journey. Every day at school, you learn something new unfolds the world's awesomeness a little bit more, make a new friend perhaps or impact someone's life in ways you cannot imagine. Does all of this not matter if there is no afterlife? I leave you with that thought.