Of Birth and Passing

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Earlier this month, I officially set foot into my fiftieth year of life on this earth. I've been waiting to emphatically state my age as fifty! when asked. (Though technically, I still have a year before I can do that..) Why? It's just something I've been wanting to, for a while now. Being fifty seems like having reached a milestone, feeling really grown up and wise. It feels loaded. 

So I was really looking forward to my forty-ninth birthday. But the passing of two ex-colleagues within a month of each other – one, just the day before my birthday and the other, exactly a month before my birthday – left me very dejected and low-spirited.

It was unlike any birthday before. Suddenly, the frailty of life seemed so much more clearer. It also drove home the fact that I've already lived more than half my life. As the day moved on, I was caught up in answering WhatsApp birthday messages and taking phone calls, as is the case with all of us on our birthdays, these days.


But my mind kept going to my two ex-colleagues, both around the same age as me. One, whose smile lit up his face so brightly and the other who always had other colleagues around him laughing for some comment or observation of his. He also always 'liked' every one of my posts on this blog. I would think every time, that I should reach out and talk about old times. Somehow, I never did. And now, I never can.


With a birth, attached are so many hopes and expectations and dreams and aspirations. The world celebrates a birth and there is always joy and happiness associated with it. The innocence of a newborn can melt any heart. 

In the same way, a passing of a life is an end that cannot ever be changed. All the unsaid and the undone will remain just that. Forever. It is a finality like no other.


All this, however, is of the people around the life that is born or the one that has passed. Isn't it strange that they themselves will never know any of it? The central figure always remains oblivious to it all.


And so, as the bittersweet day ended and midnight passed, I went to bed hopeful that each passing birthday would leave me more wise and accepting.

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