3 deaths in life

24 hours, 3 deaths brushed by me and made me think.

The turtle that got caught in the nets at Porto Heli. The poor creature, my sister said, was tangled in the fishermen’s net and must have frantically drowned. Do water animals drown I wonder vaguely, whilst my soul registers the waste of decades and decades of a life and regrets its agony, despair and pain. 

The almost dead fish in the tank last night- ailing amidst his fellow prisoners, all waiting to provide sustenance and pleasure, at the whim of a diner’s pointing finger like mine. The sick creature agonisingly gasped for air, sank in the bottom corner of the tank. Its grey skin greyer still, its eyes clouded and unseeing. There was consciousness in his eyes-milky as they were-despite his tiny brain. Lucky taught me to see Consciousness in animals’ eyes…even in the brilliantly cold serpentine ones of the cobra I showered with in Wat Koh Tahm. Through loving him I learned to see the Light reflected from their eyes, to see the joy and the pain and to recognise that they too have a Mind. I silently wished him fast liberation onto the other side. Now I wish I had the forethought of mind to buy him and set him into the inky black night sea to die.

And my friend’s aunt; a human being. She passed last night after a long illness that indecently robbed her of any quality of life. A liberation too. Yet my mother’s death taught me that this consolation is no consolation at all to the living. The person she was will be sorely missed and her pain will be mourned. I pray for her spirit to soar where there is no pain, in the eternal Light.

3 deaths: A majestic ancient animal of the seas, a humble fish whose purpose was to end up on a plate, a human person whose life we understand the most. For whose pain, agony and death to grieve more? I know the conventional order of things.  Still, these days, I am finding the sorrow lines blurred more and more. After all, they all are creatures of the divine energy we call Life.