'On Death and Dying.'

 Yesterday I sat beside my cousin's bed as he laid there facing waiting for the Angel Israel to do his job, Mohamad Kalam is still alive when I left him and he is 79 years of age. All that is left of the man is skin and bones and I can feel this as I kept massaging his abdomen to ease his stomach pains from not eating or drinking for quite sometime now. His stomach was shrunk and i could feel the spinal column almost almost through whatever is left of his stomach muscles and his chest cavity was sunken like a bowl. This I felt was the pain and suffering that every man alive will have to face in his final hours of death and I have done this death watch over quite a few individuals in the past. I have watched the final moments of my elder brother's life as he laid on the hospital bed at the Intensive care Unit with tubes sticking in every crevices of his body fighting for the next breath of oxygen; he died of kidney failure. I sat witnessing an aunt gasping for air with every strenuous effort to stay alive until she gave in and her soul left her body. Earlier on the first of May in 1990 I had carried her husband's deceased body into their home after driving the van he was driving with his body laid in the back where someone had left him there after he had a stroke and collapsed by the vehicle where a passerby{s} had put him back into the van where I found him. It was not a nice sight as he had defecated himself from the massive stroke; he had adopted me since childhood till I was twelve where I was returned to my immediate. When one of my nephews died from a motorcycle accident I went to retrieve his body from the morgue along with his father who wiled out loud upon seeing his favorite youngest boy on the hospital slab and later spent many days over the death and dying process of the father himself. Later on I frequent the hospital visiting his older brother a drug addict who had overdosed himself till the day he too passed away in the most sorry state of a death mask I had ever seen, it was almost  scary...

One evening while driving home from my work place at the Petronas construction site in Gebeng, Pahang on the East Coast I had pulled out two bodies from a car that had just been involved in an accident with a truck loaded with cement. It was at dusk and darkness was gathering around me. The first body was of a young lady sitting in the back seat behind the driver. Her eyes were wide open as though in a shock but i knew she was dead but the driver in front of her was still alive pinned between the steering wheel and the back of his seat and he was bleeding from his mouth with fear written all over him. I managed to pull both bodies out of the car and laid them along the side of the road covering the dead girl with my 'sarong' and sat holding the driver and waited for help as few drove by and eventually one stopped to take the still alive driver to the nearest hospital which by then was nightfall. As the road was not a choice road for traffic there was hardly any vehicle that goes by and I left the site of the incident as soon as help arrived to remove the girl's body; talk about fear of being alone in the dark with a dead body by the side of a lonely road! I was barely able to eat for the next three days and the smell of death lingered with me. 

On another occasion as I was driving towards my jobsite at the Petronas Refinery Complex in Jerteh, Terengganu, I noticed a body lying on the road with a motorcycle laying on its side a few feet away. I stopped to ensure that passing vehicles would not run over the body as there was long line of vehicles that were headed for work on the early morning perhaps to the same construction site but none had stopped before me leaving the body sprawled by the road. I was working as Health and Safety Officer back  then and so I thought it was my duty to do so even if it had nothing to do with me.

I can say that I had few experiences in the past in facing death even if it was not of my own and it has made an impact on me perhaps in a positive way as I find that I can handle myself better than most when it comes to dealing with the dead and dying. It also taught me of the fragility and impermanence of the human form and how some people fear while others show respect for the deceased. I have been massaging my cousin Ahmad Kalam's body  for quite sometime ever since he had his bypass operation  a few years back and now that he is on his last lag his form has shrunken to a state where it was too delicate to handle. While caring for those in the process of dying one has the chance to reflect upon one's own feelings about illness and death and comes to learn to respect life and death For those who are interested in the process I would recommend reading the Tibetan Bok of the Dead or better known as the Bardo Todol, or Elizabeth Kubler - Ross's on Death and Dying.

May The Lord grant me a swift and dignified death.