A tree dies quietly, but it is no less sorrowful a thing to witness.

Photo: A screenshot of a video of the leaves of my tree dancing in the wind.

Since April this year, I have found myself ill with something or the other. I suppose it is normal to fall ill; a care specialist once described inflammation to me as a natural order of things, of the body learning to tear down and repair itself, of some kind of inner strengthening against all the things that could make a body ill.

I am sick of being ill, I tell her. I am so fucking sick of being ill.

Actually what I am trying to say is, every time I am ill, I feel that I am failing at this thing called life, that I am somehow being pushed back to something before a starting line, a runner in a race where everyone is already miles ahead of me.

I am sitting in my living room, head bowed over a steaming bowl of hot water and two drops of peppermint oil. It is morning, and I have woken up with swollen sinuses and a splitting headache. I try to take deep breaths, and I can feel the heat cause small rivulets of sweat form on my face. I feel salt under my eyes and wonder whether they are tears, or whether my eyes are sweating.

It doesn’t matter, right now, I must try to breathe.

….

Time passes and things break down. By things, I mean, machines, thoughts, philosophies, ideologies, plants, cutlery, cars, clothes, nails, hair, thoughts, the human body. Wear and tear, all at the hands of time.

It is inevitable. Also, I suppose, a privilege. To be slowly worn down as the waves climb against the shoreline to a rhythmic drumbeat.

Often when I am ill, I think to myself, it is a privilege to be alive. It is a privilege to be alive. It is a privilege to be alive.

The dark part of me, the one that likes to come out when I am feeling my lowest, when I cannot breathe, or when I am sad, or when I feel the most unworthy, says in a snide tone, that it would be a greater privilege to be alive and well.

Most things are relative.

Like time. Time is relative. Sadness, joy, frustration, anger, fear. Emotions are relative. Living is relative.

Death, now death, is absolute.

….

Today, P and I buried a tree.

Now, that sounds a little weird, and I suppose, also factually untrue. But it is intentionally accurate, in that we put a living thing that has died, to rest.

The factual truth is: Today, P and I disposed of a tree in a giant dump bin near our flat in a rubbish bag.

As I was ripping the dead tree from its pot, watching flurries of dark black-brown soil spill over my toes, I tried to memorise the feel of the tree against my hands, the hollowness of its weight, its braided trunk now gnarly and dry, its roots crumpled and small, a shadow of the thing that has lived and breathed and grown with us in our new home the last six months.

A tree dies quietly, but it is no less sorrowful a thing to witness, the slow waning of vitality, the dripping of its life force as lustrous green turns to a dull green and then brown, leaves that were lifted up in the air slowly drooping, drooping.

The good thing about this, or maybe the sad thing about this, is that I have had time to mourn this tree. I want to say we tried, we tried, we changed the soil, we put it in a different place outside the house, and each time we tried, we failed a little more, because it kept dying, time kept passing.

I couldn’t bear to leave the tree in the bin so I made P do it.

I don’t use this word lightly on myself because it feels alien in my mouth, on my skin, but death, recently, has made me more of a coward.

….

The first time they gave me chemotherapy, I had a horrible allergic reaction to the solvent in which the chemo drugs were administered.

My throat started closing, and then my heart started tightening, I remember my eyes popping out of my head, and me gesturing wildly to my husband as I choked out, call the doctor, please call the doctor.

The thought in my head - the irony if the medicine kills me before the disease, the utter comedy of it all.

The nurses came, my oncologist came, turns out this happens often enough with patients, and I just needed the drug administered more slowly so that my body could acclimatise to the onslaught a little better.

I say onslaught because modern medicine sometimes is that, an onslaught of the warrior good guys going at the bad guys, all in the hopes that the human being survives the war.

Sometimes the war looks like inflammation, like fever, like antibiotics.

Sometimes the war looks like inflammation, like cancer, like chemotherapy.

…..

I love how the word time keeps creeping into everything I write, this insistent nosy little bugger, this thing that is omniscient and sometimes incredibly slow and unbearably fast.

Someone I worked with died the other day, I read it on LinkedIn. I didn’t know what to think, only that death is absolute, and time will continue to pass after death. It is okay.

Someone I know lost someone they loved recently. I read it on a text message and felt myself weeping a little. What a small message, what an irrevocable change. It is not okay.

I don’t know what I mean to say here, only that there is no life without death, and I suppose no death, without life.

My tree has died and is now lying in a bin, but in the soil in another pot in my balcony, grows a beautiful little miniature karuveppilai plant. On the ground, the carcass of a caterpillar, blackened and dried from the punishing heat. Just an hour ago, a bird, sitting on my kumquat tree’s branch, ferreting.

I read somewhere once that death is but another season in nature’s time, and I suppose it is. I suppose it is we humans - with our big sentient brains, and our complicated hearts - who make much ado about this thing, death, which is accepted with a supernatural grace by every other living being.

Today, I am certain of this, that I am able to breathe.

It must mean that today, I am alive. This is enough.