“Life is a funny thing that happened to me on the way to my grave"

“Life is a funny thing that happened to me on the way to my grave"
My elder brother once spoke these words during an inter-school debate and has since forgotten about it.
Yesterday as I prepared myself to enter St. James church I was sure I’d be able to stay calm and attend my first funeral, I heard the words ring in my head.

Dr. Wilson (or Willy as we called him) was principal of St. Stephens during my 3 years at college. The 3 years that changed my life. What made a man that I hardly spoke to during college and only began talking to 5 years after I graduated …… so dear to me ?
May be it was the notices that he wrote, one in particular was concerning my love for dogs that had led to a canine menace in rez. Maybe it was his stories in the assembly like the one about the Ostrich that every batch had supposedly heard before us. Was it because during graduation dinner he mentioned me when he said “even Andre Fanthome has cleaned up and looks like a man!”

As humans we always tend to look for reason to justify everything, this tragedy is no exception. As I stood talking to Anu and Mrs. Wilson in the cemetery I shamelessly broke down as we all agreed that at times like these we fail to find reason.

There is no way to justify the suffering and pain,
There is no way tell why all this upon us came.
There are no reason for what went wrong,
No reason to see so weak, a man so strong.
No way to hold the tears back and smile
No way to ask for time, just a little while.
While images and voices from the past,
Make his memory linger and his thoughts last,
As tears rolled down in selfish thought
Of his pain and suffering I forgot.
To see a family I barely knew
To share that pain of but a few
And now I write to speak his praise,
To his life my glass I raise.

There are times when you have to let go and just be a person and not some one behind the lens!