Shedding untimely death: A Suite of the Strong

Deaths are termed almost always untimely. If a person dies in their teens or up to their early 30s, the possibilities and the unfulfilled dreams make a case for the ‘untimely’ nature of death. On the other hand, a death in the 60s can be termed as “they couldn’t enjoy the retired life” or a death in the 40s – “terrible: middle of nowhere” – aka untimely. The passing away of anyone before the expected fulfilment of potential is indeed unfortunate. Depending on the part of the world you are reading this from, a funeral ceremony is performed and is concluded with the close ones reciting Rest In Peace (RIP). Intended for the soul of the dead but in many ways for the ones that are alive, to accept the inauspicious occasion and to move on in the longer run.

Can this concept be extended beyond a person’s death? Does untimely death happen for more things? What does it have to do with strength? What could ‘shedding an untimely death’ mean?

Before we get to that, let’s look at the event where a snake sheds its dead skin. Almost all the animals discard the dead skin including us, it’s just that the snakes do it in a more visibly comprehensive manner. And we love visibly unique phenomena, don’t we? Snakes shed their old or dead-skin because they grow but their skin doesn’t; almost like we humans growing out of our clothes until our adulthood. It also helps them cast away harmful parasites and bacteria on the skin, which can in some cases lead to loss of body parts or blood flow. To sum it up, snakes HAVE TO shed the old skin – ‘untimely’ grown dangerous for their own existence.

Coming back to the human world, of course, mourning over a death takes time. Shedding behind the grief of death isn’t easy and that’s why getting over it is a Suite of the strong. But we aren’t talking only about the untimely death of a person or our dead skin either. Can there be a case of death of friendships, relationships, neighbourhoods, situations and skills? Probably. And what’s more peculiar about these is that they are almost all untimely.

Not only because they happen suddenly and unexpectedly but also when they do, they lay deceivingly low, underneath our scope of realization. To emphasize it, the death of a close one in a car accident is sudden and unexpected but the time of death is a certain fact that can’t be hidden. But it isn’t that evident in other cases.

Let’s take an example of a typewriter. From the 1880s to the 1980s the use of typewriters increased exponentially. In the span between the 1980s to 1990s, a typewriter was an indispensable part of any office environment. The skills of typing the fastest, with minimum mistakes, and knowing in and out about typewriters were in full demand. People spent several hours every week to get better in these and rightfully so; many made their entire careers as typists.

Post-1990s, deceivingly gradually, computers started replacing typewriters and those that kept practising the ‘typist conducive’ skills kept losing out. No one could say that the death of the typewriter and these skills had happened on 25th October 1989 (just a random date) but it had at some point. Those that couldn’t get over it kept striving to revive a dead entity. Some realized it several years later, and some never did. The longer it took, the deeper they were cut.

Isn’t it so with friendship? Or a relationship? The once thriving relationship on one fine day feels like a one-sided drag. Of course, it is not a mathematical equation to have it split 50-50 always, but then neither does the law of averages lie. You realize the pattern of you trying to maintain contact, keep conversations going and crumble under the weight of cold shoulders for all your enthusiastic plans. Man, O Man, the weight of cold shoulders is one of the heaviest recorded on this planet!

But even here, for the patterns to emerge and to calculate the averages, the cradle of disappointment has to be rocked multiple times to realize the untimely death of that relation.

Now it’s a novel idea to review what went wrong, to avoid repeating the same in future but it can’t be the first step. The first step, as the simple-minded and cold-blooded snakes take, is to discard the dead skin. Unlike us, they don’t waste a second questioning “why it didn’t work out” or “let me continue dragging the skin along – maybe it will return to life…” They simply focus on discarding what is dead. For them the choice is clear, leave the skin or die along with it.

But think about it in our case, don’t we also die every moment we strive to revive something that’s no longer alive? What’s the point in polishing the skills that have no means of livelihood? – (unless it’s your hobby)

As ‘untimely’, as unfortunate it may seem – shedding away the untimely death of the skills, relations and situations alike is the first cogent step. Certainly, one can follow up with introspection and a detailed case study to learn from the losses but only after the dead entity is completely registered in your mental records. That’s how the greatest sportsmen, the generals on the battlefield completely empty their memory cache about the events till the minute before the present and with zero emotions take the next logical step. Difficult to master but that is the epitome of strength.

Are you carrying the load of the dead relations? Can you spot them, to begin with? Are you sure you are not pursuing dead skills? But the most important question is, can you nonchalantly scoot over any sort of death, no matter how untimely it is?