By: Swami Sivananda
When someone passes away, we talk of “untimely death”, how unfair it is to be snatched away unexpectedly, and so on. True, but no one knows when the Grim Reaper comes knocking at one’s door. A letter that a monk in our Ashram wrote addressing his illness and state of mind has been doing the rounds and is being described as an obituary he wrote for himself whereas he was simply expressing his feelings, at a certain point in his life when things seemed to have turned upside down all of a sudden. A quirk of fate, as some may put it. And the letter has touched our hearts and moistened our eyes. The Mahasamadhi of Shirdi Sai Baba on 15th October 1918 signifies this point. Sai Baba has declared that he would live forever and the bones in his tomb would take care of devotees’ welfare.
The significance of Baba’s Mahasamadhi is that life is eternal, and death is only a comma, not a full stop. The Atman is ever-living and his own giving up the body earlier in 1886 for three days to get rid of his Asthmatic attacks is writing his own obituary. Sai Baba wanted his devotees to consider every day as his last day on this earth and therefore to be good and do good.
But yes, a famous British Journalist who settled at Rishikesh near our Ashram did write his own obituary, for a lark, when he was in the prime of his youth. He, till the end, was vigorously engaged with the subject of death. He wrote an obituary for himself when he was still a young man and included the following epitaph:
“Here lies one who spared neither man nor God
Waste not your tears on him, he was a sod
Writing nasty things, he regarded as great fun
Thank the Lord he is dead, this son of a gun.”
He was into his nineties and every day, almost, he would say, was lived out in suspense. He was tangentially different from Sai Baba.
Would the end come today? Tomorrow? But his interest in the topic was more philosophical than morbid, even a quest to get to the bottom of the mystery, if possible; he suggested to our Ashram he could be ‘buried at Ganga’ as an eco-friendly alternative.
So what is it about death that its very mention makes some furious, feel humiliated, even angry and offended, while a few others turn philosophical, accepting, even poetic? Sai Baba’s Mahasamadhi shows how he accepted it.
A Monk in our Ashram posted a question with great enthusiasm, in our Satsang, inviting all to write in their obituary as Sai Baba prepared for his last moments. The outcome? A deathly silence.
Writing your own obituary could be viewed as an act of vanity, or as an exercise in self-evaluation, or as one that seeks to imagine how one might be perceived. Or simply, it might just be something that one would like written about oneself, post-death.
Personally, I find epitaphs far more entertaining, thought-provoking, and in some cases, quite hilarious. When Mel Blanc, who did voice-overs for cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig died, his family carried out his wish expressed in his will that his gravestone should carry the words, “That’s All, Folks!” This was how episodes of Porky Pig would sign off at the end, and that’s all Mel wanted his gravestone to say. And it cannot but bring a smile to one’s face.
Coming back to the British Journalist near our Ashram he was a self-professed atheist. He didn’t believe in reincarnation and the afterlife; at other times, he would say he was agnostic, and his only religion, if he had one, was ahimsa, nonviolence. He had the following epitaph fixed in the cemetery at Rishikesh
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.
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