Fragility, frailty, fate and fear

No matter the class, race, or culture. No matter the place, time, or situation. The capacity to feel loss, to fear death – perhaps not in itself, or that of oneself, but that of others, and other things – and to love. These are central to what it means to be human.

Sitting there in the heavy silence, the eyes uncomfortable in settling on anything else but the floor, the ears picking up the wails and low murmuring of relatives – not mine, but a friend’s, the heart wanted to cry out not only in sympathy, but in realisation of a lesson learnt. That the human body is a fragile thing, that we are all living in a false sense of security that we are immune to the random nature of fate, and that we are, after all, human.