The Conveyor
They say leap years are harder than the rest. Death has leapt high, her scythe raised to reap an entire generation. Life adds another turn to its spiral, while we say goodbye to our parents.
Yesterday we paid our last respects to Daisy. Or rather, to the little box that was left of her, as one wise lady put it after hurrying through the rain and puddles to make it at the very last moment.
So it is. Little boxes… on the conveyor.
A man in a work smock goes about his business, wheeling the trolleys back and forth. An attendant slips quietly into the hall to change the last digit of the year of birth. The numbers hang on the marble wall. Together with the name, they emphasise the intimacy of the moment. The dearly departed is identified and, after the ceremony, will dutifully proceed to the final waiting room.
There, in the small service room before the cremators, the coffins look almost like ordinary crates. The lids are closed, hiding the flowers and the traces of tears – or relief. An experienced eye can tell, by the flowers, how well-off the family was and whether the deceased had many friends.
Thus, without faces or flowers, stacked side by side, the coffins wait for their turn. A cremation takes a little over an hour. The purifying power of fire will free the space of another dead body while somewhere over a drink we speculate about the supposed journeys of the spirit.
Indeed, saying goodbye to the box has its purpose.
I look at the flesh left of Daisy. Dying is not simply the moment your heart stops beating. It was the same with my father. A daily battle beyond endurance. A slow yielding. A gradual acceptance. Until every desire to go on living has been drained away. Cruel, perhaps – but necessary? To want to leave. To be let go by those closest to you, who, in their life-clinging selfishness, do everything they can to keep you here – frail, useless, suffering, yet alive…
I look at Daisy’s final sleep and remember all our wonderfully crazy conversations. She was truly unique in her urge to think and to know. Freedom of the press found her at an advanced age. While, in the undergrounds of the new era, the aesthetic of chalga was swelling, Daisy wandered from bookstall to bookstall to obtain authors once banned by her own ideology. She rushed from theatres and film premieres to concerts of contemporary music. What a thirst! For as long as she could, until the instrument of her intellect failed her, she never stopped learning, asking questions, searching for answers about existence. The future fascinated her. The very process of thinking fascinated her.
This memory brings me back to my father. A few days before his death, I asked him what I could do to keep him from being bored, alone in his bed. “I need nothing,” he said. “I’m reciting Pushkin to myself.”
They left this world with fulfilled minds. The last Mohicans of a rare breed for whom knowledge and culture were their religion. They never let any pressure bend their beliefs. Naïve – or strong in spirit?
We shall understand it, we who are next on the conveyor. I look at the box and clutch four gerberas. What did they give us? Will we, who have sent them off, manage to hold on to that strength? After all the conveyor of death has its dignity. What is truly terrifying is the alluring conveyor of life.