“Dear Grandpa…”
By: Yosh Weerakoone
Tags: Family, Grandfather, Mwc Death, Death And Dying, Conversations

“Hi Seeya, it’s been a year since we last spoke to each other; A full year. Where did the time go, I wonder… The last time we spoke, I was shaving your beard as you lay in a hospital bed connected to a dialysis machine. You couldn’t hear or understand me very well but you seemed to enjoy the shave. Today, even though I can’t express myself as well as I want in Sinhala, I imagine those mortal limitations like what language I speak doesn’t really matter much now that you’ve crossed that great divide.

Almost the whole family is grieving for you this week, but if I’m being very honest, I don’t think I’m grieving for you. I miss you a little bit, but every year I miss you less and less. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t really know. Whatever the case, I’m just really glad you’re no longer suffering. I guess if you were here, you’d tell me that the purpose of all living beings is to experience Duḥkha; because to suffer is a universal part of the human experience as the Buddhist doctrines describe.

Hmm… I recognise that. Suffering is an integral part of life but that’s a different kind of suffering, wouldn’t you agree? I suffer through 100 hour work weeks to achieve something, but I enjoy the meticulous process; there’s a certain peace in my violence. But, the suffering you encountered, towards the end; that wasn’t the same, was it?

I think the thing I’m most sad… No, ANNOYED about are the questions I’d like to ask you NOW, most of which even if you did receive somehow, I’d get no reply to. You know so much that I crave to know! I feel like the last few years we shared in this realm, I wasted a lot of questions. My wife is constantly telling me not to waste questions, nay WORDS! (SPOILER: I still do. Pretty sure it’s a character flaw.) Every time we met, I asked you the usual routine questions relating to stuff like whether you ate, or how you were, and what you were doing. Such petty shit. I only asked those questions because I didn’t want you to feel even more isolated when you couldn’t hear or understand what I was saying without the whole family shouting it in your ear. I feel like just when I was uncovering all the interesting questions to ask you, you were slowly losing the ability to receive them. Life has a curious irony to it, doesn’t it?

So, now! I’m gonna IMAGINE that you can fully comprehend and appreciate what I’m saying/asking and shoot you a few questions! Granted I might imagine some answers for my own peace of mind, but if somehow you miraculously end up at least getting these questions— that would… actually, defy the laws of Physics. Bugger. ANYWAY!

Where are you right now?

Now that you’ve crossed the great, mutually exclusive, unifying divide of being alive versus, whatever else it is you become… I can’t help but wonder where exactly the blooming heck you are? A lot of people down here are pretty self-convinced that they know what awaits them beyond the veil but I’m not so easily convinced. Empirical evidence has always been my go-to source, am I right? Kinda like that one time, you told me not to try and peek into the mechanical concrete brick-maker. I was certain there must be something inside the moulding trough I wasn’t tall enough to see into that you didn’t want me to see. Turns out, it was just a pinch-point hazard for tiny little fingers: how boring! But, lesson learned.

Anyway, back on point: are you carousing and making merry in the Great Halls of Valhalla with the Valkyries? Maybe, you’re hanging out with the Who’s Who in Christian Heaven? What about silently lying somewhere in hypersleep limbo until Judgement Day? Did you carry secrets to the grave that would land you somewhere less savoury? (That last question definitely landed me in the ‘disowned’ section of the family). Maybe you were born somewhere else? Fits with the Law of Conservation of Energy… but Physics isn’t a 100% right now… Maybe you had an opportunity to choose one of the above? SO DOPE! I’d probably go with the last one. I’d choose that one because there is a probability that you would be born as an alien on a habitable planet a quintillion light years away, where the light of the previous Star you and I lived under doesn’t even reach you because of the expansion of the Universe. That would make me related to an alien species, separated by Stardust. How cool would that be? Pretty darn cool.

How did those last few years sound like to you?

I always wondered what it sounded like to you. I was always so curious why you opted to remove your hearing aid. Maybe there was nothing really wrong with your hearing but maybe it was something wrong with how your brain was seeing those electrical signals? Kinda like those old SEGA cartridges that wouldn’t read. You had to blow on them and wipe the contacts down not because there was anything wrong with the data on the cartridge, it was just that the contacts stopped relaying that information efficiently.

That’s beside the point. What did we sound like to you? Did we sound really really quiet and muffled? That’s pretty cool because that means you could literally sleep under any conditions. A few months back, I woke myself up from a rude bit of flatulence: No problems for you! That said, it would probably suck if I couldn’t understand other people. Maybe we were like really robotic sounding? Kinda how it sounds like when I’m talking to my friend Sam on Discord and the connection gets awfully yucky. That makes sense I think. There are sounds coming through but they are pitch shifted and with just enough delay that it makes it impossible to understand. I forget at how many milliseconds delay a human thought process desynchronizes, but there’s a YouTube video on it somewhere. It would be cool to know how it sounded like to you.

Did you know we all loved you?

I guess when someone is as old as you were when you stepped across the veil, one year towards the end was only 1/83rd of your life. Such a small fraction of a whole. I guess that’s why early memories stay engrained so deeply. When I was celebrating my 2nd birthday, which was literally HALF my ENTIRE LIFE at that point, to you it was approximately 1/45th of yours… I’ll be celebrating my 31st this year, and let me tell you — my 30th definitely felt like 1/30th of my life. I just blinked past the date at work and didn’t think twice about it. I guess maybe that’s why people start setting 5-year and 10-year goals when they get to around this age. Puts the completion of a goal at 1/6th intervals of your life… or does it — since you’ve grown older? *shrug* Can’t be fu..ssed to do the math right now!

Either way, even though in the end some of us were probably very close to only 1/83rd of YOUR life, YOU were part of 1/1ths of OUR lives, so just want to say we love you lots and where ever you are right now, Live Long and Prosper!”

Yoshith Putha.