It’s 3 am in the morning. While the world is still shrouded in twilight, while humans in this part of the world are still in slumber, in one room a bell rings.
That sound in another house could probably mean nothing, but in this house the sound could be a sign of impending doom.
In this house there is an old lady who no longer has much control over her body.
It’s been a long day for everyone in this household. The sound of the bell does not pierce their fitful sleep initially, but its insistent ringing finally does.
The mother is the first one to awake. She wakes up to go see what it is, because often its just the old lady unable to sleep, unable to distinguish between night and day.
But today was different. Today was a day we would all understand how much we take our body for granted.
She enters the room, the room from which the scent of sickness never fades no matter how much we try.
She sees the old lady, lying in her own piss, unable to get up from the floor, unable to will her body to obey her command.
She turns hysterical when the mother goes close to her. Screaming someone tried to kidnap her and then left her on the floor.
The mother calls her husband and daughter, to help pick the old lady up. 90 kgs is a lot of dead weight for even three people to carry. We learnt that the hard way that day.
Our inability to pick her up, hers to control her body, the stench of the room, of her clothes drenched in her own piss lead me to realize a million things at once.
Yes, it is true that you only live once.
Yes, it is true that there are medications to cure practically all the diseases out there.
But there is one thing that we seem to forget.
That if your body starts to get disintegrate from the inside, if your excessive indulgence is too much for the body to sustain, even if you give it medicines, its going to slowly steadily give up on you.
And that one thing which you took for granted, independence, the ability to look after yourself will slowly turn to dependence.
So much so that you become like a new born child, making up stories, depending on your children to feed, cloth and clean you. Life completing an entire circle.
My point through this blog is not that one does not enjoy the pleasure life has to offer. You truly only live once.
But that does not mean you live a life of excesses, taking your body for granted at every step. Treat it with love and consideration, the same way you treat your memories and relations. And I promise you, you will be able to enjoy your life till the end of days. Rather than experiencing the same fate of the old lady, ringing the bell at 3am, depending on someone else to pick her up, while the rest of the world was in slumber.
The body that was taken for granted.
Photocredit: Unknown. I tried looking for the name of the photographer who took this brilliant image but couldn’t find it. If you do, tell me the name in the comments.
All Things Human 