A Riddle for Kübler-Ross

There’s something so sad about a dead man with shiny shoes
and a lunch bag.

[Also on The Skirmisher]

I got this email today, about somebody who got hit by a
bus crossing Ayala Avenue in Makati.

 

And the first thing in my head was, “What shiny shoes.”

 

How neatly the shoelaces were tied. And the lunch bag. These
little things, how strongly they remind you that this headless corpse used to
be a person; that people cared about him enough to shine his shoes or wash his
socks or prepare his lunch.

 

It makes you remember all those times you’re going out for
a new day at work and tying those shoelaces and thinking of that old Stephen King
line, SSDD (same shit, different day),
and hating everything.

 

I’m probably just being silly and hopelessly melodramatic;
maybe this is what I get out of “unintentionally” watching Gulong ng Palad on most nights. These days, when things like Rotten
or Philippine politics have killed an enough number of brain and heart cells to
leave us so jaded, there are still some things that make you stop and wonder,
in a Milan Kundera sense.

 

Of course, all of us die a little, every single day, if
you believe people like Sylvia Plath or Courtney Love.

 

If you’d ask biologists, they’d say things like you
replace your entire skin every some months or so, or each of your cells is gone and
replaced every seven years. It’s one way of saying that the person you were
seven years ago, that’s dead now, and the only thing that creates the illusion,
the semblance, of continuance is memory. And stem cells. But let’s not even go
there.

 

Maybe, yes, we all die a little every day, but at least,
those little deaths are nothing dramatic; just a bad hair day, a broken tooth,
a night of heavy drinking that decimated thousands of your neurons.

 

But if you end up lying on the pavement and staring at
your own squashed brain, right there, on the same metropolitan road so many of
us beat everyday, it just makes you stop.

 

Or maybe I’m not as hardened as I think I am, after all;
at least, not as dead-hardened as any regular faceless, nameless Iraqi. Not as
neuron-fried or fed-up as those vendors in Quiapo.

 

Somehow, the first image that flashed in my head was that
scene in Fallen, where the serial
murderer is being gassed to death and he’s singing that Rolling Stones song,

 

“Time is on my
side, yes it is…

Time is on my side, yes it is…”

 

Says a character in that Nicholas Kazan film, death is probably
what you get when you finally figure out the answer to the Big Why.

 

That when finally, in that small moment you figure out why
there are six billion of us here on this blob of mud and nothing seems to make
sense, death strikes you to shut you up. So that the secret remains a secret
forever.

 

So that the answer to the Big Question remains
heartbreakingly inaccessible.

 

Sometimes, I imagine Death as something formless that
leaps from person to person, unseen, flying above your head as you walk the roads
of your days; it brushes past you, breathes down your neck even during your
happiest of moments. And then one sunny day, it finds you and smiles at you. It
finds you to shut you up.

 

When the Roman town of Pompeii was unearthed in the mid-1700s
after almost two thousand years of being entombed under volcanic debris, one of
the graffiti on the walls the excavators found said something like, “Let’s eat,
drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we’ll die…”

 

You can’t stop it; nobody can. And because we know it’s a
losing game, we sing our songs and drink our beer and fornicate whenever we
can.

 

Like that murderer being gassed to death, the Pompeiians
would also probably sing that Rolling Stones song in the last moments before
Vesuvius came raining down on them—just to mock and spit in the face of the
inevitable. That is, had they known the Rolling Stones.

 

That dead guy on Ayala, why is it so easy for me to see
him in those last critical seconds as he crossed that road, humming that same
song because finally, on his way to the office that morning, the Big Answer to
the Big Why struck him. Like Archimedes’s eureka.
Like Tony Kushner’s “blue streak of recognition.”

 

And as swift as the Big Answer came, death arrived to shut
him up. Just like that.

 

So that the secret remains a secret, the Big Answer
remains, forever, so heartbreakingly out of reach.

 

“People walk during the rush hour mindless, automatic,
vapid, safe. I am walking past lives I will never know and faces I will never
fall in love with.”
                        – from an old Eric Gamalinda piece of fiction.

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