The Riddle of Death
What is death?
A simple answer would fail on every aspect. What if we say there is no such thing as death? It is the name of a concept. Nothing more. Let me explain.
Once, a man killed a woman who was sunbathing on a beach. He was caught red-handed, knife in hand. He had stuck the knife in the neck of the victim. Her major artery was cut, and she bled out in minutes.
The murderer was asked why he committed the crime. Did he know her? Was there any past enmity?
The killer replied in the negative. He had not even seen the face of the victim. She had pulled a towel over her face to escape the sun. He explained his motive simply: “I wanted to see death. I wanted to see death itself, not the dead body.”
He was asked if he had succeeded. He replied: “I saw that lady becoming motionless, but I couldn’t see death itself. But now I am convinced that I can die too.”
This was a pure intellectual crime. The killer used a person as a guinea pig. Had he experimented on a pig or a rat, he might have escaped. But he chose a human. The first woman he saw in an isolated spot was chosen to be killed. Her identity meant nothing to him.
Witnessing Stillness
Death is the actual riddle here, not the woman. The killer never wanted her name, her face, or her history. He wanted to watch the exact point where life stops. What he found instead was that this point cannot be seen.
He witnessed stillness, not death itself. Death has no visible threshold. There is no moment a witness can point to and call “there.”
What he actually confirmed was an inference. Bodies stop moving, therefore he too will stop existing one day. He mistook observing an effect for observing a cause.
An animal could not answer his question. A pig’s death proves nothing about a human’s ending. Only humans reason about their own ending in advance. He needed a human subject to mirror his future.
What he obtained was belief, not knowledge. Stillness was enough to convince him that he too would end. The act was not revenge, lust, or hatred. It was a man borrowing a stranger’s death to rehearse his own. He called that rehearsal an experiment to feel like an inquirer rather than a fearful man.
Grammar and Ontology
Death is not a thing. It is a word we built to seal off a process we cannot otherwise hold. The killer’s error began here. It was grammar mistaken for ontology.
In Hindi, elders used to say gujar gaya (passed away), not died. They never claimed a new entity arrived. They named passing, a transition, nothing more. Another phrase they used was poora ho gaya, meaning completion. It names a life reaching its full shape. Nothing is snatched, nothing is broken.
English and clinical language did something different. They turned a verb into a noun. A noun behaves like an object in the mind, even when none exists outside it. Once language hands you an object, you expect to locate it and witness it.
That expectation killed the woman on the beach. The man did not seek a person. He sought a noun’s referent. He cut a throat looking for an entity that grammar invented and nature never supplied. He confirmed a transition and mistook the absence of a witnessed entity for a failure of method.
This is the deeper crime of modern epistemology. It reifies process into entity: mind, time, death. It then proceeds to study the invented entity as if it were external. That move feels rigorous. It produces categories and definitions. But when the entity is fictional, every experiment inherits the fiction.
Denial of Completion
Calling the end “death” performs a denial. Denial needs an opposite to fight, a thief to catch, a moment to pinpoint. Completion offers none of that. It simply closes, the way a circle closes, without leaving a villain behind.
This is why an event had to be invented. An event can be witnessed, measured, and feared. A natural completion cannot be feared in the same way. Fearing your own wholeness makes no sense. So, the mind manufactures urgency where none exists.
The killer enacted exactly this invented urgency. He could not accept that a person simply becomes complete.
Life lived as a sentence ending naturally is replaced by life lived as a war with an external killer. The war story flatters human effort and struggle. The truth offers no such flattery, only an ordinary becoming whole.
The Grief Audit
Consider another example. I was once in a prayer meeting for a departed friend. He died before reaching fifty. Frankly, with an untreated schizophrenic wife and cantankerous in-laws, his passing was an escape. His children were the helpless victims.
In the prayer meeting, a preacher explained the meaning of the Gayatri Mantra. He said that when a fruit is ripe, it falls. Those very in-laws, who made his life a living hell, protested strongly. The preacher had to change the subject. I left.
Their protest exposed the machinery. The preacher spoke a plain truth. A ripe fruit falls in its own time. Nothing is stolen, nothing arrives early. This statement should have comforted the listeners. Instead, it angered the people most responsible for his suffering.
Anger here is the clue. Completion removes blame. A life that simply ripens and falls leaves no one to accuse.
The in-laws needed exactly the opposite story: an external killer called death. They needed a tragedy that struck a poor innocent man from the outside. That story hides their own role inside his decline.
Calling it death lets witnesses become mourners instead of the accused. Calling it completion forces a harder question. What made the fruit ripen so fast?
Untreated illness, hostility, and exhaustion all played their part. The preacher’s plain truth threatened to turn grief into an inquiry. The Gayatri Mantra is not a commentary on dying. It is a request asking to be ripened and then carried off. It is willing participation in completion rather than resistance to it.
This is what makes ignorance universal. The information sat inside their own ritual speech. Clarity was recited daily. Yet, clarity did not become understanding.
Understanding asks for surrender, and ritual asks only for repetition. Truth and ritual repetition are two different acts entirely.
Does Death Exist?
Death as an entity does not exist. Death as a word pointing to a real process does. Absence of life is death, whatever that life meant when it existed.
Something happens, undeniably. A body stops breathing. A person who spoke yesterday speaks no longer. This is a fact, not an invention. What is invented is the leap from process to entity.
We treat that change as a thing that arrives, strikes, and takes. The fruit really falls. No separate falling-demon comes to pluck it.
The process is real and total. But is it really something worth fearing?
There are things worse than death.
Hospice Care
Hospice care is another term which describes the care of a person waiting for death. We may call our lives miserable. But clinging to life does not cease. The body does not support existence. Sitting up becomes a struggle, but life refuses to end. The mind refuses to be silent. Breath continues, even if on artificial support.
This is the point for which many people choose the “Do Not Resuscitate” option. They opt out of any attempt to support life artificially. They choose to pass on.
Palliative Care
Barely a few inches away from hospice care stands palliative care. An ailing person is given advanced care and support. The difference between this and hospice care is only a technical detail. The expectation of death is not imminent, though a possibility remains.
The human body, limited in its reach, is the worst imprisonment. We walk by people in palliative care, not realizing how difficult that life is. A person becomes dependent upon another for daily needs, and living becomes an affront to dignity on an hourly basis.
Unfortunately, this is not the worst. There are things even worse than death, but we will talk about pain.
Euthanasia
Pain and living in pain are two different things. Like death, pain has no existence. It is a sensory experience of the mind. It is the worst torture the human body can experience. Ailments that cause constant pain are many. But excruciating pain at all times is unfathomable.
Unfortunately, those not in pain are debating the choice of death over pain. It is unfair. If a debate is required, it should be held by those who know what they are talking about. We give license to substances which cause slow death, but we frown at accelerated death.
Then there is something worse than that. It is living without any sensory experience. The mind fails so completely that it does not relate to anything. The legal definitions of the vegetative state of a person differ. But being unable to relate to the world is worse than death.
Death is a darling if only we understand it. It ends certain miseries of the body. These are the miseries that eventually follow the body.
Human suffering is real. Its causes may or may not be real. Religion is the easy escape from that suffering. We will discuss God and Religion in the next chapter.