I have never seen a man cry until I've seen that man die.
Scarface, 1994, The Diary.
31st December 2019,
It's a good date, end of a year and beginning of another, end of a decade and beginning of another...a day of great promising hope yet today am attending a funeral of a friend, an old man but a great friend.
This makes me reminisce on other deaths of friends years back. Maybe six or seven years ago, smoked up, high as a kite and arguing with hip-hop heads about who the greatest rapper of all time is, a friend played a song for me from a classic album released on my birth year.
The quote above is a lyric from the chorus of that song, the statement seemed profound and as a lyricist myself I am obsessed with qoutes and if you've read enough of my writing you must have already realised how much I love being quotable... shout out to those of you who screenshot some of my thoughts that resonate with your own depths.
I love qoutes, I love to live by them and even use them in life and also in speech, this particular qoute though ... I never truly grasped it's full meaning and thus have never quoted or applied it anywhere since stumbling upon it.
Well, in my obsession I started researching what these words truly meant only to find out that the author of the statement himself was high when composing and recording it and thus never realised how profound the statement was up until it had the impact it had on people who heard the song, in fact this made him listen to his own song after sobering up so he could truly comprehend his own words.
How could such a casual statement bear this much profundity? I guess the value of it evaded him as much as it evaded me until I witnessed a man dying in 2016. T
There he lay, unconscious yet his face spoke of an unfathomable pain.
He lay motionless, yet I could feel the enbattled energy oozing from his frail body, there was an ongoing struggle, a fight that I knew he would never win and the knowledge of it seemed mutual.
He lay expressionless but somehow the aura of death lingered over him, an unspoken lesson seemed to emanate from his diminishing presence, a lesson for me maybe and for others in the room, maybe now that I write...a lesson for you too.
I just stood still, looking at him, still alive, I knew he was still alive because a fly would rest near his nose then as it descended near his nose opening the fly would be blown off by the slowly but seemingly moving outgoing air.
I just stood still, not helping him with the fly problem, I was busy engulfing my own breaths of air laced with fumes of aspirin tablets and stenches of dirty linen laying on the ward beds, a few of these were bedsheets whose last occupants died the night before or the night before the night before that, the room stunk of death.
I had visited the man everyday for an entire week, to some extent I wished he'd die sooner than later, the pain he was in seemed unbearable.
When I say pain, am not referring to the physical, his body was in pain allright, but his soul seemed to be in a greater anguish, I could feel it within myself that this man was begging for death to take him.
I never thought I'd pray for death to take someone but that day I did, if he was strong enough and could stand I'd help him up on a stool and hand him a hanging rope then help him tie it around his neck before he finally hangs and peacefully dangles in the air from the roof, am not an advocate for suicide but sometimes I've seen people suffer pains that made me wish they were dead than alive, sometimes life is more cruel than death and inexplicably death seems to offer a relief to the dying person.
Pardon the wishful thinking, I could have suffocated the man with a pillow right?
Anyway, this man took forever to die and finally his peace came and escaped down his cheeks as teardrops.
I rejoiced instead of crying, to date I've never cried about it, not in the ward, mortuary or at the funeral, matter of fact I inherited his belt the day after he died even without his or anyone's permission and wore it in his funeral.
This reminds me of 2009 when a friend commited suicide while wearing sunglasses he had borrowed from me, he just hang there with my glasses on and while everyone was shoked by his decision to hang himself all I could think of was "Damn, my glasses, we cool but if you want to die with swag how about slaying us with your own shades?"
I knew both men personally, they don't know each other and have never met but they were good people, I've drunk quite a lot of alcohol with either on many occasions, had many conversations, they were both really smart, generous and kind but three of us seemed to share a striking resemblance in character, they were kind to all but unkind to their own selves and so am I.
Back to the dead man in the ward though, he was many things, but his final years were filled with too many wrong decisions, self sabotage, and an almost suicidal tendency of not treating himself well almost as if hellbent to punish himself or someone else by making himself suffer, I guess as he grew old he grew tired of life and chose dying over living.
You see, suicide is not just hanging yourself or taking poison, suicide is also not putting any effort towards proper living.
We are shocked everytime we hear a person has committed suicide yet we commit suicide ourselves everyday by giving up on our dreams, by constantly choosing to ignore our bad habits, by sabotaging our own improvement and successes, we are killing ourselves bit by bit and then we call it growing up or maturing or other fancy words....truth is, a lot of people are just fractions of their full potential not because they no longer possess the potential but rather because they let the belief and enthusiasm inside them die.
Breathing but dead inside, that's what we are.
"The richest place on the planet is the graveyard, down there we have ships that will never sail, planes that will never fly, music that will never be composed, art that will never exist, inventions that will never occur ... just because of dreams that were never pursued"
In a life of noise, death comes with a unsurpassed clarity.
Death offers a glimpse into our entire lifetime, present and afterlife all at once....it is truly in the presence of death that a man truly knows almost for the first time what he has been, what he is and what he will be after.
My dying friend knew these three, and this knowledge tortured him more than the physical pain his body was suffering....his energy was of regret, self pity, guilt, remorse, repentance, fear, despair, pain admist of pain and all these wrapped into one single horrifying facial expression...one can evade truth but the truth you've evaded your whole life will reflect in your face in your moment of death.
If you live well, you die well.
If you don't live well, truth dissolves your fake joy and peace before death dawn's on you.
Life gives us chances to change ourselves, change who we are, mould values of compassion, extend love to others, live righteous before God and for God but after these chances expire...death visits and oftenly finds us in regret for not doing what we ought to have done, for not being who we ought to have been and for doing what we ought not to have done... regret mostly arises from things we didn't do rather than did, guilt arises from things we did that we shouldn't have done.
Men cry when they die because truth breaks all men.
Death comes as closure and the life you've lived rushes into your conscience to relieve or torture you. It's seems to me, a man at the point of death wishes for a new life so he can do what he should have and not do what he shouldn't have...but then again, there's nothing like a new life except for the life that is starting in the next paragraph of this article in the next second in this lifetime.
Who am I really then?
One need not be near-death to experience a life-changing moment I wonder then if death came to me now...
would I be peaceful?
am I really afraid of passing away?
am I proud of these decisions I've made so far?
am I in regret?
how would I die really?
who would I be in that final moment?
Most importantly though, who am I right now?
As for myself, I don't know, but that's just the way I am.
Life is one and linear, the past, present and future are just one thing....all it is is a stream of consciousness of who I was, who I am and who am going to be.
Few realize all this is codependent, I am who I am because of who I've been and I will be who I'll be as a result of who I am being now. I guess then, one can't create the future in the future, the future can only be created in the present.
One can't fix the past, but one can harness the past into an energy that feeds the present, positively or negatively so, and if negatively then, the future will only be a replica of the past but if positively then the future can become as good as I consistently will it to be in the eternally continuous present.
That's who I am really, a stream of consciousness with a will and power to be anything I choose anytime I choose.
Take this end of the year or decade as the end of your life so far, as a glimpse of everything you've been and done since birth.
Take now as a glimpse of everything youare and all you'll be and do from now till death.
That's all...
...a new dawn is here, a new birth and a new life...
...have a present lifetime onwards.
Victor Mafusa