Death before you die

You remember how when you are angry at someone but you can’t talk to anyone at the moment so you just talk to yourself, how there’s just you but two different opinions. Two same voices but nearly opposite beliefs. We all have such a voice in our head, and of all the comfortable people out there, no offence, but this voice in our head is the most perfect conversationalist. Let’s call my ‘that’ voice Mu.

So I was having this really deep conversation with Mu about how everything has to be official before it’s considered done. Like when you learn to drive right when you are 15 or so, but you have to wait till 18 to get a driving license. Of many other things, there’s an official procedure to confirm the death of a person. But there are actually two stages for someone to die, when a person’s heart stops beating, it means the mind is not getting blood, which means no oxygen is carried to the brain, and soon the brain will run out of oxygen to function and the whole body just dies. But the brain lives much longer than the heart, so that is why there are two stages of complete death, first is heart failure and the second one is brain failure. Most commonly, people die of old age or a disease, which basically means their heart stops beating due to a disease or just because of ageing. But if these are the steps, can someone die with their brain first and not lose the beating heart first. Of course, that happens when a person is at high altitude and your brain does not get enough oxygen and people faint for a while and in worst cases, people die. But what if these disorders out there, like Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer, people actually suffer from dying brain? Maybe our brain needs just more than Oxygen and that’s what these disorders cut off. Or when someone has a panic attack and things look foggy and suddenly “boom!”, they’re in a different world, they behave abnormally, and more. So, there must be something that we could gather from here. Allow me to explain a disorder that’s not much common like others but it is laying there for a long while, autism. A person with autism seems to lack social skills, and they’re not very outgoing. Basically, they are hardcore introverts. So, could that be something? It obviously has something to do with the brain, right?

Our brain is a mystery. Scientists have been studying this piece of some ‘unknown-artform’ for millennia or more. But there has to be something we can understand at the superficial level. No, I’m not going to tell you to stop using technology and let that lobe of meat sweat. There are research-based studies to tell you that keeping your brain engaged in challenges keeps it young for years, but you’re not reading a research paper. On this very level, with the understanding of mere nothing, we can talk about how people go into anxiety and depression. How social factors are affecting our social and personal life & how we all are depressed at some point in our life but the issue is never dealt with. We move on with our life, with people, to responsibilities and just one day that laying mess of unsorted questions hit again, and we’re traumatised. Some are just never dealt and remain buried forever. Unforgettable questions in our head we never seek answers for, it all piles up. After a point, it starts to self-reproduce. Like, the old questions give rise to new ones, and the cycle has just started to get dirty. Until all that has left is a pumping heart and no brain to pick rights & wrongs. No brain to feed dopamine, the hormone of love to. No brain to feed adrenaline, the hormone of good. But just a calcium skeleton, with some flesh wrapped around, and that too all lose and soggy, pale and ageing. While all the people around you are just telling you how fucked-up you are and how bad this situation is. And now, not only you but people around you and helping to cliff-up the pile until they can’t. Until it’s too much for a dead person to take until it’s too many instructions for a robot to take until it can’t.

Then there starts a fall. Ignorance, because nothing is helping, and it is all messed up as bad as it can be. Detachment, because all that support that could have been asked for is fulfilled and it’s time to fall. Anger, because with no all that has left inside is a ticking bomb, getting warmed up by every bit of flicker and bullshit everyone’s throwing. The best part is that ignorance, detachment, anger sums up for rudeness and irrespective of what it is for, you get thrown-out, left-out with your rudeness. To let you sink in the pile of questions to find answers, all annoyed, in the same pile. But it is all just too much, and the load right above the function-less head is too much, suffocating. And the dead die. This time, officially.

---xxx--- -Sakib Tamboli, A Story Teller

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