Carpe diem it is!

I do not read foodie articles in newspapers, magazines and the other million outlets; I eat to live and not the other way. But, this post is based on one such article in the foodie section of The Guardian.

I work in a private educational institution as a contract (for one year) employee teaching students. Don’t ask me what I teach because my response will be most unsatisfying to you.

That gets me to the crux of this post. The institution allows the students to celebrate something it calls Carpe Diem. That sentence carries in itself some strong irony, in my opinion. One should not need permission from others to seize the day, the casual vis-a-vis the context-laden meaning of the Latin phrase. That permission, if indeed the phrase refers to a let, it should be from within oneself.

This is what should catch the reader of the article to which the link above leads. A man who does not know when he is going to die agrees to a suggestion from a foodie writer – “carpe diem it is.”

That is, he is going to one restaurant (one of the few the writer-friend of his has suggested) to have dinner, possibly for the last time, or may visit the others, if indeed there is a next evening for him. In the article, the writer appreciates this “phlegmatic” approach as opposed to some fanciful and sentimental clap trap. The decision is as crisp, “carpe diem it is,” as it is final.

His widow says, “For the last time he could enjoy the taste, the ambience and the people who treated us with touching consideration.”

Somehow I could manage to take in the message without sentimentalism. The cancer patient Hugh Paton taught me how to take life, in all its variegated forms, with equanimity; embrace death without welcoming it. However, he was not the first one to teach me. My mother led the way for me.

Before reading this article, I thought of death taking cue from how my mother, who also died of cancer, treated death. She neither feared nor welcomed it. She coughed her way through death, filling mug after plastic mug of her innards the homoeopathic treatment that she was brainwashed to undergo distanced her away from the thought of death. Not once, night or day, did she rue what life had dealt her.

Now after reading through the article and thinking back on my mother, I think she came close to seizing the day. She lived and died on her own terms, even if I, her first born did not approve of the supposed medication she took. I let her die the way she wanted. Upon her death, I was neither happy that her suffering ceased nor sad that she suffered that long, about a year. She did not admit that she suffered. I know this as, she, recently widowed, on her own, arranged my wedding. And her choice of my bride has been wonderful. I could not have done any better on my own.

I was planning to post this blog tomorrow. That would have rendered this post meaningless.

Having posted it today, having practiced it, I can preach to others,

Carpe diem!

Raghuram Ekambaram