Watching death

I had a strange day. I visited a family friend who is on her deathbed, sick and bulging with pancreatic cancer. A 73 year old woman, the world at her feet with a net worth of almost a billion ringgit but reduced to a yellow skeleton with a bulging tummy. A woman who once motorbiked across the African continent and the Chinese Silk Road, shared many laughs and cried multiple times with my own mother, a woman who has existed on the fringes of my own life ever since I was a child. I was never close to her but was aware that she had watched me grow up through her close friendship with my mother; never playing a part in it but still existing within it. Curled up next to her was her husband, an Australian man who came to Malaysia to make a home with her, partnered with her in building that billion ringgit empire, drove the motorbike across the continents with her in his sidecar, held her as she wept hearing their adopted daughter had been raped and holding her now as she lies in bed waiting for death to take her.

As I sat by her bed reading Surah Yasin with my father, I couldn't help stealing glances at the two of them curled up next to each other. Seeing her eyes barely open, hearing her ragged breathing, watching her occasionally struggle to sit up but completely failing. Seeing him stare at her with the saddest eyes I have ever seen, seeing him reach over to draw her closer to him, hearing him kiss her cheek and whisper, "I'm here" as I whisper the next ayat. She was curled up like a baby in the womb, her hair wispy and cropped close, in diapers, looking every bit as helpless as a newborn. He was stroking her head and holding her with all the tenderness and affection of a parent welcoming new life, but instead he was determined to deliver that tenderness and affection until he would see the life go out of her eyes.

How beautiful it is to be able to build such a life together and share so much, but how sad for it to end with something as lonely and cold as death. To share every aspect of your life, not existing without the other person only to end up on a path where you can't follow or can't be followed. No person to come with you into the next world. No amount of money, love or memories can save you from the solitude that comes with death. Which is lonelier? The solitude of passing on to uncharted territory without the one you shared everything with, or the solitude of being left behind in a world that you used to share?