When they leave us…

What’s the similarity between death and a thief? Oh! Don’t feel that I am going to tell you a joke, as I have found one between both. The thief comes stealthily and takes away the thing that we love the most. In the same way death too comes surreptitiously taking away our dear ones whom we cannot part with, leaving a giant hole in our life. The impact of the tragedy will multiply when death comes unexpectedly. It just snatches away that lifelong cherished relation of ours, leaving us totally blank, making us wonder about our survival without those dear ones.

I am finding it hard to move-on from tear-jerking impact of the dark, horrifying loneliness that has been created in my life, after losing one my dearest friends, on Sunday. The shocking loss of that loved one has made me totally forlorn all of a sudden, even amid the supporting words of my friends. I have all my friends around, supporting me, but find it hard to go on leaving behind those heartbreaking moments of losing him. He who had always been my supporting pillar throughout my life has left me all on a sudden amid the mystifying journey of life. ‘He has reached heaven’, people do keep on telling me so, or synonymous futile words intensifying my pain. Has he actually gone away from me? No, and I wish to believe that he is watching me and hearing my words from the other room, where I cannot go now, but later.

Even though it’s not going to lessen the searing pain of his death I wish to believe in that way, at least to bring down the intense feeling of suffocation that I have.

I have been asked not to be alone, to be always occupied with some work or the other to alleviate the pain, but even my work is not lending me a helping hand.

If Ann Frank had survived...

“From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind,”

Anne Frank

Feb. 23, 1944.

She would have told us more about the scary ‘holocausts’, the dangers of war, about cruelties that she witnessed, about the megalomaniac dictator and a lot more, if she had survived…

Anne Frank, the symbol of hope, even in the peak of sufferings and evil, would have turned 80 this week, if she had survived.

“…I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

She would have been happy to see her horse chestnut tree that helped her to know the seasons of life, during those two years that she and her family hided themselves from the Nazis.

“Our horse chestnut is in full bloom,” wrote Anne Frank on May 13, 1944, “thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year.”

A report that I recently read in NY times says that Miss Frank might have had her last glimpse of the chestnut tree in August 1944, before she and the other occupants were taken to the camp, where she later died of typhus.

Before reading her tear jerking experiences, I used to wonder at the thoughts that she might have had during her life in the attic as I am finding it really hard to even imagine me getting locked up in an attic, for a minute or two.

Through the words of this exemplary diarist her readers stumble upon the life of the millions of Jews who were lost to this world. Tears might have rolled down her eyes on seeing her dear ones getting succumbed to the tragic life.

Her writings, the way she has penned down her thoughts amid the tragedies that she faced, bear the voice of a truly recognizable person among us. Her scribbles give the true images of Nazi persecution during Second World War. The way she has engraved it, in the midst of the sufferings of the concentration camp, is truly exemplary. The touching and chilling diary has been translated into almost 60 languages around the world.