Obituary

I recognized the name immediately but not the face blurred by age: the man I went to school with as a boy dead at sixty-five. The obituary, noted sparingly: “Died at home after a long illness.” which I understood to mean he had suffered all that time. “Suffered”: Latin, sufferre = from below + ferre, to bear: to bear from below, beneath the flesh, from within; also: to sustain pain, injury, discomfort. Many die this way. It made me think: What is the point of suffering in the face of death which wipes out all sensation and memory? Death is not a repository for our sufferings, does not recycle them into new or different sensations, reusable later for pleasure or emergencies, as though they were spare parts.