My father’s passing is my first close loss that I got to experience. And I feel strange about it. It is as if I should be feeling differently about it than I actually am. For the first time after losing someone, I catch myself thinking about the meaninglessness of life. I think about the utter uselessness of our efforts to work ourselves to pieces trying to earn a living, trying to grow in our careers, fight for what ever we feel we should be fighting for, trying to do good in life, to improve the world around us. For the first time after someone close has passed, I am thinking about the complete pointlessness of everything. We are born, thus we will die. And when we’re finally dead, our body gets festively dressed up all to be then boxed up in a casket. And that’s where our earthly efforts end. Then some of us get turned into a cloud of smoke and contribute to the CO2 emission, the later gets picked up by the trees, while others get shoved deep in the ground, so they can slowly decompose and turn into fertile particles that can be then picked up by the roots of plants and fungi. Both exits sound like magic, even though the latter feels to me somewhat more poetic. I have also heard about the air burials, which to me in the first instance felt very brutal. But then again the idea that the peaces of your dead body can feed the vultures that fly eagle high up in the air, has also its allurement.
The thought that my father has joined the food chain of the cemetery plants feels like a worthy personal contribution to nature. In the first month after his passing, I was busy in my head with the different scenarios what happens after the death. I couldn’t stop my mind from creating the images of his body’s slow rotting and decomposing just like the veggies that go bad in the fridge. In efforts to fight these gross images, I also tried to think about the sky as the gathering place of all the dead, hoping that my father might have joined his loved ones that he once lost. However, when I flew above the fluffy clouds to attend his funeral and then back home, I tried my hardest to look as far as I could through the airplane window, but I saw no sign of him. In fact it was so empty up there, that there was not a single lost soul to spot. Sure, I can accept the idea that the souls are invisible, but then I get confronted with another disturbing thought, and I can only imagine, how all those dead souls must be mad at us, the living ones. Because every fun vacation flight to Ibiza, The Canary islands, or feel free to fill it in with your favorite exotic holiday destination, each and every of these flights must be crushing the peaceful space of all the souls that have been gathering up there for some 200,000 years now. If that’s the case, then when traveling in the air became common, the dead must have been forced to organize a mass relocation due to the lack of privacy and the noise pollution.