Philosophy, shmilosophy. Death happens. It sucks!

It has been a month since Nelson Mandela was taken to the hospital.  If not for the machines doing the breathing for him, Mandela would have died many days ago.  This is exactly the kind of a situation that I hope I will not be put through, whenever that time comes.

Of course, Mandela's month is nothing compared to Ariel Sharon's condition.  Remember Sharon?  The tough no-nonsense former prime minister of Israel?  Back in January 2006, Sharon suffered a stroke and brain hemorrhage that a mere couple of decades ago would have ended a human's life.  Not now. Sharon continues to live in a comatose state.  He is 85-years old.  Mandela will be 95 in a fortnight.

Mandela and Sharon are not abstract entities.  They are real people, with real family members.  And those families do whatever any typical family does.  We want to fight that death.  Even when the person is 95 years old.  Even when it is a comatose state in one's eighties.

Mandela's and Sharon's machine-assisted living are, to a large extent, reflections of our inability to deal with mortality.   We are not at ease to deal with our own mortality as well as another person's mortality.  We struggle.

And we struggle a lot more as our personal connection with the dying person gets stronger.  Thus, we cry and sob when one of our own dies, but we rarely ever pause when some stranger across town dies.  When an Ethiopian dies in a village somewhere, well, we don't even know about it for us to react, though we know that quite a few Ethiopians die every single day.

Which means the death of the person is not merely about that person.  But, it is really about us.  If that death matters to us, affects us, then that death is significant. We shed tears. If that death does not matter to us, we couldn't care.  We continue to watch movies, make love, eat, do laundry, without any change in our lives.

Oh, but, death is terribly traumatic when it is a close one who dies. Doesn't matter if it is a dog or a human. A grandfather or an uncle or a mother. It gets us.

When you lose someone very close to you, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds.

Our stories are so intertwined with that life that is no more.  When my dog died, that part of my world was shattered. To pieces.

With my dog, Congo, a couple months before he died

An outsider from a culture in which dogs don't matter much would not have understood why I should have grieved that loss so much.  But, I did. I do, even now.

[If] the hardest thing is not that the other person’s life has ended but that our own has been ripped to shreds, then has grief become a deeply selfish thing? I don’t think so. The phenomenology of grief means that we cannot draw any simple division between self and other. We feel confused — are we crying for ourselves or for the deceased? — because our feelings for ourselves and the person we love can’t be neatly taken apart, just as we cannot neatly take ourselves apart from those to whom we are closest. Rather than being a purely selfish thought, the idea that someone was so loved that he became a part of you is the most profound form of appreciation possible. It’s perhaps also why death is so often marked by regret, which is not about just you or the one you mourn, but for the shared opportunities lost to you both.

Yep, that some other person, or even a dog, was loved so much that they became a part of who we are is why we grieve so much.  Which is why the death of immediate family and very close friends and pets tear apart our lives, whereas the death of that Ethiopian is a mere statistic to us.

Every death is:

a reminder that no one gets it all straight, and that even the best philosophy in the world can’t save us from ultimate extinction, likely in a state far from enlightenment. It has to be enough to have lived well and to have played a part in the lives of others too, and the only philosophy worth its salt is the kind that helps us to do just that.
However we grieve, after the tomb is sealed, the ashes scattered, or the coffin buried, all we can do is get on with trying to make sure we write the best chapters of our own lives that we can, while contributing some good lines and passages to those of others. We can’t guarantee that the great editor of fate won’t ruin it by inserting an ugly ending. But we can give the bastard as little help as possible.

So, yes, give that grim reaper as little help as possible.

On Mandela, Nehru, and Washington ...

Given the news about Nelson Mandela, here is a re-post from a few months ago:

Every year, it seems like I always end up remembering that November 14th is Jawaharlal Nehru's birth anniversary.  It is etched so deep in my memory that it can never get erased perhaps?  Maybe it is also because it comes only days before the birthday of my closest friend from high school?  

When India became independent in 1947 and, became, thereby, the world’s largest democracy, Jawaharlal Nehru became the first prime minister.  While India continues to function as a democracy, there is a distinct possibility that Nehru’s continuation in that office until his death in 1964 precluded a natural growth of leadership and made possible, though not by his design, the family dynastic politics which characterizes the country now.

Nehru, his daughter—Indira Gandhi—and grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, have all together governed India for 37 of the 65 years!  Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, is currently being actively groomed for the premiership even as his Italian-born mother, Sonia Gandhi, serves as the party chief.

But, at least, throughout all these, India plods along in its experiments in democracy.  India’s sibling, Pakistan, has had more years under military rule than as a free society.  In the years since the end of the Second World War, which rapidly terminated European rule over colonies in Asia and Africa, very few countries have had democratic governments.

In contemporary times, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela does appear to be a rare founding president.  In 1994, Mandela became the president after the collapse of the apartheid regime that had imprisoned him for almost three decades.  With all the national and local goodwill behind him, Mandela, too, could have remained in office for a long time.  Yet, he opted to exit the stage in 1999 after serving only one term.  Mandela’s shine becomes infinitely brighter against the backdrop of the likes of Mubarak, who was the president of Egypt for 31 years, and Ben Ali’s 24-year reign over Tunisia! 

As we scan the rest of Africa, half the sub-Saharan African countries are authoritarian regimes.  The most notorious among the rest is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who has been the country’s leader ever since he successfully led the country to its independence in 1980.  In the process of cementing his rule, Mugabe has managed to convert what was the breadbasket of southern Africa into a living hell. 

The fact that democratic governance cannot be taken for granted even a decade into the twenty-first century, is quite a reminder of how much the eighteenth-century thinking of the framers of the American Constitution was way ahead of its time. 

America was an untested political experiment in the final decades of the 18^th century.  In a world that was defined by kings and queens who claimed that divine right granted them the authority to rule over people and wage wars, America was setting up something completely different.  

Even in this setup, in a time period when victorious generals automatically became kings, George Washington, as America’s general who led the war to secure its independence and firm it up, made it clear that he would be no king. 

As if that much trailblazing was not enough, Washington, unlike his contemporaries who died on their beds as kings, unless defeated in wars, voluntarily walked away from the presidency even though there wasn’t any real threat to his office.  When Washington officially retired, it was not only from the presidency but, for all practical purposes, from politics itself. 

Washington's farewell address is a testament to his humility that comes from strength; he notes that he might have made mistakes, which were unintentional, and hoped that “after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”   

Awesome!

I wonder how India's story might have been if after completing two terms, in 1957, Nehru had walked away from the office of the prime minister and from politics itself. Given that he was a serious student of politics, I wonder why Nehru didn't draw that lesson from Washington.