Are you there God? It's me

In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of… death. It is Covid season, after all. And it is not just the legitimately and legally young who think it too early to die – all of us do, whenever our birthday. As we gingerly step into the world masked and gloved, we are aware of the toll this ever-present danger has taken on our mental, physical, fiscal, creative and spiritual health.

Planning for the future is now on autopilot, a previous obsession robbed of its simple pleasures. Vaccine or no vaccine, we can’t help thinking that we may not make it. And this brings us to regrets if any.

When we previously thought of deathbed confessions, we imagined lying delicately in sepia sunlight, being wise beyond words at the ripe old age of ninety-plus. Surrounded by pensive grandkids and people just grateful to be around us, we break into a self-deprecating monologue that will be quoted widely. We dreamt of photogenic funerals and inconsolable former lovers; mourners refusing to accept our going; people too choked to tell each other of our passing.

Now we suspect a quick forgetting. A down-market mention among acquaintances. A statistic brought up in passing. Worse, no one will know we are gone till they try our number and there is no answer; we will just be missed calls in the end! So we quickly revise our Last Words. Like the hero shot in a desi film who knows he won’t make it – leading men who survive don’t launch into long speeches – we stutter and stammer breathlessly to anyone who will listen. And what is it that we say? Turns out we only have instructions on the hoarded basmati sacks in the store room.

The previously rehearsed monologue about a life richly lived and the profound regrets that will gently reverberate through listeners eternally don’t seem in sync with the current mood. Our sermon about materialism and selfishness being bad, bad things, and any admonishment to the younger generation to focus on family is now passé.

As we fight the crippling fear that we will be the first and last fatal victim of the vaccine, our hearts race at the thought of such a casual and meaningless departure; though this is publicity of a kind, it is not the kind we want.

Behind our masks and visors we may string together the best of sentences and deliver them in husky whispers through dry, chapped lips but all the prose in the world can’t put into perspective the pandemic and its randomness. With mortality in the process of reviewing itself, if we can squawk out a few details about bank accounts and property papers we’d be lucky. All the rest – of having loved a neighbour passionately all our life, of flaunting fake PG degrees, of drinking secretly – will be just incoherent ramblings.

Ah well, someone will say, he lived a long enough life, while we make faces at him from our perch in the afterlife.