The paradox of Death: Routine, yet always exceptional!

Raju Korti
To me, death has always existed on two irreconcilable planes. One philosophical, the other painfully real. In thought, it overwhelms; in experience, it devastates. No amount of spiritual discourse can cushion the blunt force of absence. The unbearable knowledge that you will never again see that person in flesh and blood. The mind can debate eternity; the heart cannot bear finality.

Board at a crematorium

Yet, amid this emotional chaos, I find myself observing those who live and work in the orbit of death, people for whom it has become almost procedural. In hospitals, nurses and doctors steel themselves before breaking the news to a waiting family. Their faces, often expressionless, betray the fatigue of repetition. It is not callousness, but a necessary armour, a coping mechanism that allows them to serve without collapsing.

At crematoriums and burial grounds, attendants perform their duties with an economy of gesture that borders on ritual precision. They lift, place, and light pyres, their hands moving through smoke and ash as if through air. To them, the end of life is another beginning of a shift, a routine, a livelihood. I often wonder whether the smell of burning wood still stirs anything in them or whether familiarity has numbed them into quiet acceptance.

Even in government offices, death finds bureaucratic expression. A death certificate is printed, stamped, and filed away like any other document. The clerk behind the counter may not flinch at the name, but somewhere, that piece of paper marks the end of someone’s world.

My own tryst with loss, the untimely death of my 37-year-old nephew, tore open this contemplation. Grief, I discovered, is not a moment but a state of being. People say time heals; perhaps it only dulls. The death of someone close is a terminating pause. From where one does not move on, only around.

Science explains death as the irreversible cessation of vital functions. Philosophy frames it as transition, religion as liberation. Yet no definition has ever truly captured its essence. Death remains the one mystery no living being has ever returned to decode.

Perhaps those who deal with it daily are the closest we have to understanding it. Not through theory, but through endurance. Their detachment is not indifference, but wisdom earned through proximity. They remind us that while death may be universal, the way we meet it -- with grief, grace, or grim duty -- is profoundly human.

Death may be an illusion, as some say, but never illusive. We can study it, philosophize about it, even grow accustomed to it, yet never truly know it.