Why some deaths hurt more than others
If the value of a lifetime could be measured, what would the measure be? The count of people at the funeral? The number of social media tributes? Or the number of lives impacted while you lived?
They say death is a leveller. We are mere mortals yet some deaths hurt more than others. Some deaths hit you in a place unknown, making you feel a sense of loss you can’t explain because you never really knew them. You can’t take a day off to mourn for them because technically they’ve been strangers all along. Yet, there is a sense of having known them. The loss seems so personal. The mind questions if you should even be impacted, but your heart aches with an inexplicable, painful emotion.
Two days in a row in Aprilend, we woke up to the news of the death of Indian cinema’s finest actors. Like a lot of you, I too found out about it first thing in the morning due to our millennial habit of checking the phone right when our eyes open from sleep. I read the news lying thousands of miles from my homeland, on two gloomy, rainy days in London, exceptionally odd during springtime.
The world had lost two distinguished entertainers who had filled our hearts with artistic pleasure but with that, there’d also been a loss of a father, a husband, and a brother, which was far greater than our collective loss.
I’d lost the Dadaji of Kapoor and Sons, the Romy Rolly of Luck By Chance, the Fernandes of Lunchbox, and the Ashoke of The Namesake. I’d lost ‘people’ who didn’t really exist, except in my head. So how do you explain this feeling to a friend when she asks you, why you sound low over a Zoom call? How do you tell someone that you want to write an elegy for someone you only knew via a TV screen? How do you rationalise to yourself that you didn’t feel the same heartbreak when a stranger died in a pandemic? And that when every day millions die but most of our lives never come to a standstill. For us, they are but just a number that keeps going higher in the corner of a news channel window, that we subtly shake our heads to, and go on with making another banana bread and posting it on Instagram.
All deaths are not the same, not in our human world at least, where especially the death of actors seems like a part of our childhood or adolescence just died. It jolts us to think how mortal these humans you’d put on a pedestal all throughout, actually were. Just like you and me. Just like the ones who came on the news, a mere statistic. Yet, we mourn them like we have known them all along. Some lives are for the people. They are born to be cherished and looked up to even when they’re no more.
If you ask me how the value of life is measured, it is based on how they made you feel when they were alive and the presence of Rishi Kapoor and Irrfan Khan made me feel like I knew them, like they were mine. And ours they will be until time, space and cinema exist.
SOME LIVES ARE FOR THE PEOPLE. THEY ARE BORN TO BE CHERISHED AND LOOKED UP TO EVEN WHEN THEY’RE NO MORE