One Breath Apart

📬 Letter #5: Contemplation on Death, 'If I Died Tomorrow'

Death comes together with birth.
From the moment we are born, life moves in only one direction. It never reverses.

The Buddha compared human life to water flowing down a mountain. Once it flows, it never turns back. Life is the gradual ending of the life faculty within a single lifetime.

Yes, I have lost people close to me.
My grandmother passed away when I was fourteen. I was raised by her for several years; we were best friends. During the days of her funeral, I felt strangely numb. I didn’t fully understand what death meant, or what it meant to lose someone so central to my life. Perhaps I was too young. Perhaps I was unconsciously avoiding feeling it.

I wasn’t clear about how someone’s death related to my own life—how to register it, interpret it, or carry it.
But I was certain of one thing: life is as fragile as it is vast and deep like the universe.

Home for the Dying

In 1954, Mother Teresa encountered a dying woman on the street and brought her home so she could ease her pain, if only a little. From that single bed grew what is now Kalighat, the Home for the Dying, in Kolkata.

It had been on my list, and in 2009 I finally had the chance to visit as a volunteer.

Each day for us—six volunteers including myself—began with endless hand-washing of laundry. Without machines, every towel and sheet was washed by hand and foot. We beat them in soapy water, rinsed, wrung them out. Hours passed. Fingers pruned. Bodies soaked. Only when we climbed to the roof and hung the clean linens—watching them ripple softly in the sun—did it feel like we had passed the first gate.

After that, the sisters assigned us to care for those who were dying.

Finally—real work, I thought. I felt a strange excitement. But when I opened the door, rows of deep teal beds appeared, each holding an elderly woman lying quietly, spending time in her own way. The air was the opposite of Kolkata’s noisy streets—dense with stillness. Even breath felt hushed. Time slowed. This was no place for excitement.