13. Death

Death alone remains beyond the reach of even the Healer’s sacred art.

The Healer eases birth and by the deathbed, plays a similar part:

To ease the passing, dull pain, record the dying words is all

The Healer does. Halting death is impossible; reversing it, beyond the pall.

I learnt this the night my father died. My mother’s stony eyes

Frightened me. On the bed, a waxen doll had taken the guise

Of Father. Hands that looked like his, feet and ears and nose.

His fingers, his wrinkles, his wrists, his collarbones, his shoulders, his toes,

But eyes and mouth, to us who loved him, weren’t the same.

Some stranger seemed to have passed away. That night, no Healers came.

Who heals the Healer when there’s no one left? While to grieve

And to mourn, there was the town, in here: just two. “Bereave

“Me not,” My mother mumbled, I remember, just before my father’s end.

We watched, unmoving. His fading eyes hidden, his chin began to bend

And sag. He had no words to write and seal and burn

When next we saw the moon that ferried him away guiltlessly return

Without him. And though I saw then, in my mother’s eye, loom

The shape of things to come, I didn’t recognize therein my doom.