Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

Hope, that palliative of every human suffering: in desperation, we cling to the flimsiest of straws.

The years have gone by in a flash: such occasional note-taking as I do helps harness time, or so I imagine; lends a slightly firmer skeleton to the galactic emptiness of my life. . .and makes me feel more composed.

Perhaps life is like that: slippery, elusive, impossible to get a hold on. The difference between this moment and the next is only one of awareness. . . Yet we drift from morn till night, from day through week through months and years distracted, inattentive, and completely unprepared for the ambush—the moment of our inevitable extinction. How can I deny death its unfair advantage of surprise? So that finally, when it does arrive, I am awake and aware, observant and unastonished!

That prompts the immense certitude we all share through our years of being alive that the innermost being doesn’t dematerialize in an instant; nor all the years of one’s lived life simply wash away like so much flotsam on the tides of time. .

Because, if the dead are really and truly dead, null and void, snuffed out without a trace—then everything we grow up believing in is a lie.

Like everyone else, you see, I was an egoist. I used to believe too much in myself. But this job makes you aware that all that self-importance is nothing but illusion. What is a man in the end, Phiroze, but the powder of a few dried bones. . .?’