The Dead and the Dying
By: Ethar El-Katatney
Tags: Hajj, Minastampede, Islam

Death has been following me around lately.

It’s difficult to explain. But I’ve been feeling his presence a lot more these days. Lurking around. Waiting.

A friend of mine didn’t wake up a couple of weeks ago. Dead at 29. I’d just spent months sharing a desk with him. And death was just hanging around us, counting down mere days until he could show up.

And 48 hours ago, my bus dropped me off a couple of blocks away where death had greeted at least 769 people just a couple of hours before. I looked down and saw bodies on stretchers, and ambulances screamed past me. The stampede in Mina during the annual hajj pilgrimage is the worst tragedy to befall Saudi Arabia in over a quarter of a century.

Two days later, I’m sitting on a plane, as I’ve done too often this past month, waiting for my lukewarm tasteless airplane meal. Twenty-four hours from now, I’ll be ordering my artisanal coffee at the hipster coffee place near my studio and walking into the office overlooking the bay in San Francisco.

I was going to fly back to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia. But couldn’t do it. I flew back to Cairo for a four-hour transit just to see my sister and three brothers for a couple of hours before I had to get right back on a plane.

I haven’t really processed what happened.

All I know is I didn’t tear up when I saw the dead covered with sheets. I didn’t cry when a survivor recounted to me how he was heaped on top of piles of bodies. I didn’t feel much when I literally walked down the same path where people had breathed their last only hours before.

I only burst into tears when I hugged my family goodbye.

The thought I’m too afraid to articulate out loud keeps popping up in my head: It might be the last time I see any one of the people I love.

Death isn’t this far away thing like I thought as a child. It’s not just for old people. It’s not for the ill. It strikes anywhere, anytime. And the terrifying thought grips my mind: What if getting on this plane means I’ve seen my beautiful, wonderful, incredible grandmother for the last time? My funny little brother? And my heart squeezes and contracts to even type this and tears spring to my eyes — what if I never see my kind-hearted, loving, giving mother again?

I’m being melodramatic, I know. But I live half a world away from everyone I love. I picked up and left everything and everyone I know two years ago. If I knew my time was limited, if the life of someone I love was limited, would I stay here, so far away?

My mind and brain are confused. Twenty-four hours ago, I was sweltering in the blistering heat in a desert, praying over dead people. And 12 hours later, I walked into a mall with my siblings where people were celebrating Eid, a Muslim holiday, dressed in new clothes with laughing children everywhere.

The world has evolved where you can be in a war zone today and on a beach tomorrow. But our brains and hearts and eyes and ears haven’t caught up yet. A day ago, my eyes were seeing old men crying as they slept on the ground wrapped in nothing but towels. I was in the middle of a throng of thousands of people walking by a mountain chanting. And now I’m watching the boy on the airplane seat next to me watch Toy Story and I’m telling the flight attendant I would like a coke with lemon and no ice, please.

My life as a journalist has changed me. I remember this morgue in Egypt one time where I asked, “How many bodies?”, wrote the number down and then drove to the mall to have dinner with my friends.

And when watching fridges of bodies drive past me yesterday, when a man driving a truck full of body stretchers shouted at me to “move!” and when people sent me messages telling me they had relatives who died and might I know how they could identify them? I wasn’t feeling much. When I was told that if I had come earlier that day and walked around our camp site, meters away from the stampede area, to explore (as I was wont to do) I may have been caught in the stampede, I wasn’t struck by my own human mortality.

I was on autopilot. My brain was busy telling me to tweet, live stream, do phoners for news channels, upload vines, take photos, interview survivors — and “Oh, is he centered in the frame?” and what about the rule of thirds and “Oh, that ambulance siren was too loud the audio level will spike”, and “Oh, damn, my battery is running low and the 3G connection is too bad to send the footage to the producer”, and “Oh, when I’m walking up this bridge the wide shot will look good”, and “How about in this crowd, if I walk backwards and get a shot of them looking back”, and “Oh, maybe I should go read some Qur’an, I’m on a pilgrimage, and maybe have lunch with my mother. I’m not going to see her again for months and months and months.”

I wonder if my lack of spirituality on my hajj takes away from its meaning. I’d like to think not. I’d like to think that I did good by playing a little role in a job that is vital in this world today. I’d like to believe God put me in a position to do so and I would have been doing wrong if I didn’t do what I could do: report.

I’m looking out my flight window now. I see lights. How many lights have I seen this month? In five weeks, I have literally traveled the globe. From San Francisco to Washington DC, then onwards to Nashville, and then Hawaii. I transited through China to Malaysia, and then through Sri Lanka to Pakistan. I flew to Cairo for a day and then to Poland for a conference through Germany. I flew to Alexandria for a day and then onwards to Saudi Arabia for hajj.

Thousands and thousands of miles. Dozens of plane rides. So many humans. So many lives. So many experiences. So much we’re doing. So busy our brains. So fragmented our lives and so fluid and so busy.

We see too much. So much, it’s hard for something to leave an impact.

A week from now, no one will be talking about the poor pilgrims. Or the people who were sleeping on the ground in the 115 degree heat because they couldn’t afford a tent and were trampled while they were sleeping. We will have moved on to some new tragedy. Another boat sank in the Mediterranean, another horrific accident somewhere on the globe.

And in the midst of all this, our lives go on. We go to the mall, we order Chinese food, we watch Netflix. There’s only so much tragedy you can empathize with before it consumes you.

And the thread that links us all, present in every second: you are dying with every breathe you take. Everyone we love and care about is dying too. Could be tomorrow. Could be 50 years from now.

Love people well.