The Other Side of Death

The Greek king Alexander conquered many lands, but when his time to leave this world arrived, he lamented:

I wanted to conquer the world but Death has conquered me. I couldn’t get even that peace that an ordinary man is able to enjoy.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s last words were on these lines:

I thought despair was a crime, but today there is none in the world who is more utterly in despair than me. I was hungry for two things: power and love. I got the former, but it did not remain with me. I searched a lot for love but never found it. If human life is what I got, then it is absolutely meaningless, because its final result is nothing but despair and destruction.

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid was the ruler of a vast dominion. At the end of his life, he rued:

For my whole life, I tried to run away from my sorrow, but, yet, that sorrow still remained. I have led a life of great sorrow and worry. Not a single day of my life have I spent without worrying. Now, I am at the verge of death. Very soon, my grave will eat up my body.

This is what is going to finally happen to every human being. Yet, every one of us is oblivious to this. When the time came for the Abbasid Caliph Mansoor to die, he lamented:

If I had stayed alive a few days more, I would have destroyed this ruler-ship that has repeatedly taken me away from truth. The truth is that one act of goodness is better than the whole of ruler-ship. But I realized this only when Death took me in its grip.

Most people who are conventionally thought of as successful in this world have died feeling that they were the most unsuccessful of all. If whatever happens to a man when he nears death happened before this, his life would have been totally transformed. Whenever anyone stands near death, the dazzling delights of the world, which he was so taken up with that he had no time for anything else, appear to him as even more unreal than a heap of ashes. Behind him is a world that he has lost and has left forever, while in front of him is a world for which he has made no preparations at all.

There is absolutely no use remembering death only when it is about to overtake you. The time for remembering death is well before this, when you are capable of doing evil and seeking to legitimize it as good. But people are not willing to think about death then. At that time, they will do everything to satisfy their egos. But when they lose all their strength and when they realize that they are in the grips of the unrelenting Angel of Death, they finally remember their mistakes. But the time for such remembering is not then. Rather, it was when they were making those mistakes and when they were not ready to listen to anyone’s counsel.