Friday, January 5, 2007

What's in an anniversary?

This post was originally posted on Friday, January 5, 2007:

As the first anniversary of my father's death approaches, I can sense my mind being quite distracted. Despite my rational conscious self dismissing the absurdity of the notion, it is affecting my ability in pathetic ways. I feel low, distracted, disinterested, edgy, angry, maybe a bit of all these.

I try to reason with myself: why should it be so significant that the earth happens to be at the same relative position to the sun as it was a year ago? Why should I let that affect me? I try to think why the tradition of anniversaries may have come about. For happy occasions, there is an easier case to be made. Take birthdays, for instance - a birth of a child is, usually, a joyous and life changing event (for the parents at least). However, life needs a mechanism to avoid us rejoicing everyday, indefinitely and dropping all other responsibilities in life - so, there are birthdays - periodic, reasonably spaced ticks when you are allowed to remember and rejoice the occasion so you can do other important things at other times. Well, once there is a tradition of marking dates and their recurrence, it isn't long before religious/cultural sects begin to add rituals around death anniversaries as well. And then, death anniversaries are days to remember the dead. However, here lies the injustice. At least in the first few years after a death of a near and dear one, you are mourning and grieving for a long time after the event - you do not get back to life overnight. The deeper the bond, the harder it is to get back to normalcy. And just around the year mark, when life is more or less back on track, you are thrown into the memory again. The living loved ones remind you of it one way or the other - and you worry about those who dont talk about it - are they in so much pain that they wont talk to you? Some of them control the spread of grief by choosing not to speak to other grievers on or around the date - at least that way, the grief is isolated, rather than fueling each other to increase the levels of grief - fair enough. Others (like me) obsess over the arrival of the date, no, even more specifically, obsess over ignoring the arrival of the date. But all this, just because the earth is on the same relative position to the sun as when my father died? Why is that significant? Neither my dead father nor I would count as religious or superstitious people. Neither of us believed that the stars have any influence over our lives/actions and fate. Ironically, though, the last contribution from my father was a draft of a whole book on astrology - a subject that he did not believe in, but knew better than most people who believed in it a lot more. He had once laughed heartily when I had thought he was dead due to a misinterpreted phone call. The very idea that he could die, or that anyone could think he was dead was ridiculously funny to him. He had told us, that after he died, he was just ash - dead, gone, no afterlife, no heaven or hell, no nothing. But then, he added, it didnt matter to him, since he would never die. And he had laughed. He had believed in it at the time, and so had many of us.

OK, coming back to the anniversary issue - what if we had evolved slightly differently and had years that were 10000 days long? Then, did that mean that we would remember death anniversaries only once in 27 years? That would definitely be nice, at most about three times in your average life. It seems all the more absurd that we let the anniversary date affect us, but yet, there is this little voice in our head, who, as with many other things, overrides our reason and pushes raw emotion to the front. There are ways to fight it, control it, but there is no real way to get rid of that. Maybe in the future when we merge with machines to be cyborgs, but until then, unlikely.

1 comment:

Jayashree S Kumar said...

it does relieve u of the heaviness in ur heart when u share/remember the memorable moments v hv had vth our beloved ones who are no more. share it vth those who are on the same wavelength...who also miss the departed in their own way...though v never forget them sub consciously, it is good to mk a conscious effort to relive the moments and visualise them too again & again. that way our pain tho kindled will subside after v pour out our feelings...