In Medias Res

People lie when they talk about death.

Nobody ever dies “done”. Nobody ever “finishes the race”. Nobody ever “fights the good fight”. There is no ‘[raging] against the dying light’. No bargaining; no volition. There is no “leaving” even, as if some consent is given. Everybody leaves is taken in medias res.

People lie about the dying knowing their time is near. The truth is that there is no intimation. No foreshadowing. People only flatter themselves with meanings they forcibly assign to otherwise random events prior to the death. People romanticize coincidences too eagerly, too desperately. The events in our lives do not give way to death. Death happens, quite insensitively, in the midst of things--in medias res.

Nobody else participates in its performance either. Not even the dying. Friends are poor performers; the bereaved are worse. We take refuge in clichés, because three languages-worth of vocabulary will not have the words to encapsulate what we want to say.

Is that it? Or is that a lie, too?

And what about “[resting] in peace”? Who knows for sure that it is a resting? When people lie about everything else, why should we trust them on this, too?

Suffice it to say that some part of the rational mind recognizes the whole hullabaloo during a death, as a performance: everyone is a performer, and everything is performed in medias res.

How necessary this conspiracy is. In lieu of a rational explanation, we take to metaphors, to ceremonies. The grander, the vaguer, the better. We take to lies, to make us forget how strange it is to bury someone in the ground, and to leave him there, under all of us, never to return to his things, to his half-finished coffee, to us.

So there is no philosophizing this. There is no other perspective to be convinced about. There is no seeking for metaphors that would provide comfort. There is only death.

There is only an end. And with everything else, a loathsome, loathsome continuation.