Written upon the news of her death

She died today. She survived her husband by three decades. And the last ten years, she was confined to her bed. To her cot, actually. In a 6 by 5 room, or may be smaller. With a tin roof over her head that leaked like a broken tap when it rained. With a dirty blanket to keep her warm. A pedestal fan that was whimsical. An "all-out" that unsuccessfully warded off the mosquitoes. And an almirah that ate up a lot of space and had all her stuff crammed inside with a lot of junk from the house. This is what I remember of her, in her private little slum, 5 years back.

What did she feel? About dying. About us. About the 10 years long wasteland of time when she waited endlessly, sensing the passage of time only in the gradual decay of her body.

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What is life but an interregnum in the nothingness that exists before birth and after death. An awareness that is defined by distilling the larger universal Consciousness into the Ego of an Individual, a Person. And the awareness of this individual Consciousness set against the massive, the infinite Consciousness of the Universe is so daunting, so overbearing that we try and negate it either in pursuit of meaning that will bolster our Individual Consciousness or by losing our Ego in the trivialities of life, the latter more commonly. Either way, we speed up the passage of time by losing ourselves in activities (meaningful or otherwise) to avoid the overbearing pressure of this universal Consciousness against our own limited Individual Consciousness...till Death comes to our rescue and makes us one with the larger, the infinite Universal Consciousness.
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So, what punishment for her to face the smallness of her own consciousness and brave 10 long years without any escape but the periodic mercies of slumber. To stare at Death approach slowly but steadily and not have the escape of life's trivialities... and the anodyne of worldly relationships...and the illusion of permanence that most of us lose with Death (while she lost it a long time back).