A Riddle for Kübler-Ross

There’s something so sad about a dead man with shiny shoes and a lunch bag.

I got this email today, about somebody who got hit by a bus crossing Ayala Avenue in Makati.

And the first thing in my head was, “What shiny shoes.”

How neatly the shoelaces were tied. And the lunch bag. These little things, how strongly they remind you that this headless corpse used to be a person; that people cared about him enough to shine his shoes or wash his socks or prepare his lunch.

It makes you remember all those times you’re going out for a new day at work and tying those shoelaces and thinking of that old Stephen King line, SSDD (same shit, different day), and hating everything.

I’m probably just being silly and hopelessly melodramatic; maybe this is what I get out of “unintentionally” watching Gulong ng Palad on most nights. These days, when things like Rotten or Philippine politics have killed an enough number of brain and heart cells to leave us so jaded, there are still some things that make you stop and wonder, in a Milan Kundera sense.

Of course, all of us die a little, every single day, if you believe people like Sylvia Plath or Courtney Love.

If you’d ask biologists, they’d say things like you replace your entire skin every some months or so, or each of your cells is gone and replaced every seven years. It’s one way of saying that the person you were seven years ago, that’s dead now, and the only thing that creates the illusion, the semblance, of continuance is memory. And stem cells. But let’s not even go there.

Maybe, yes, we all die a little every day, but at least, those little deaths are nothing dramatic; just a bad hair day, a broken tooth, a night of heavy drinking that decimated thousands of your neurons.

But if you end up lying on the pavement and staring at your own squashed brain, right there, on the same metropolitan road so many of us beat everyday, it just makes you stop.

Or maybe I’m not as hardened as I think I am, after all; at least, not as dead-hardened as any regular faceless, nameless Iraqi. Not as neuron-fried or fed-up as those vendors in Quiapo.

Somehow, the first image that flashed in my head was that scene in Fallen, where the serial murderer is being gassed to death and he’s singing that Rolling Stones song,

“Time is on my side, yes it is…
Time is on my side, yes it is…”

Says a character in that Nicholas Kazan film, death is probably what you get when you finally figure out the answer to the Big Why.

That when finally, in that small moment you figure out why there are six billion of us here on this blob of mud and nothing seems to make sense, death strikes you to shut you up. So that the secret remains a secret forever.

So that the answer to the Big Question remains heartbreakingly inaccessible.

Sometimes, I imagine Death as something formless that leaps from person to person, unseen, flying above your head as you walk the roads of your days; it brushes past you, breathes down your neck even during your happiest of moments. And then one sunny day, it finds you and smiles at you. It finds you to shut you up.

When the Roman town of Pompeii was unearthed in the mid-1700s after almost two thousand years of being entombed under volcanic debris, one of the graffiti on the walls the excavators found said something like, “Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we’ll die…”

You can’t stop it; nobody can. And because we know it’s a losing game, we sing our songs and drink our beer and fornicate whenever we can.

Like that murderer being gassed to death, the Pompeiians would have also probably sung that Rolling Stones song in the last moments before Vesuvius came raining down on them—just to mock and spit in the face of the inevitable. That is, had they known the Rolling Stones.

That dead guy on Ayala, why is it so easy for me to see him in those last critical seconds as he crossed that road, humming that same song because finally, on his way to the office that morning, the Big Answer to the Big Why struck him. Like Archimedes’s eureka. Like Tony Kushner’s “blue streak of recognition.”

And as swift as the Big Answer came, death arrived to shut him up. Just like that.

So that the secret remains a secret, the Big Answer remains, forever, so heartbreakingly out of reach.

“People walk during the rush hour mindless, automatic, vapid, safe. I am walking past lives I will never know and faces I will never fall in love with.”
– from an old Eric Gamalinda piece of fiction.

***
For similar posts, see Random Acts of Strangeness.

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Tags: Kubler-Ross, death, Ayala Avenue, Makati, Stephen King, Rotten, Milan Kundera, Gulong ng Palad, Philippine politics, accidents, Sylvia Plath, Courtney Love, Quiapo, Fallen, films, Rolling Stones, Nicholas Kazan, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Archimedes, eureka, Tony Kushner, Eric Gamalinda, JB Lazarte, Skirmisher