Time

“Time is the biggest healer, with every second and minute passing by, the pain of losing our friend, Nathan, will surely dwindle within our chest. We can all rest in peace knowing that he is in a better place now. “The priest ended his words in a comforting consoling tone.

After signaling the entire church to observe two minutes of silence, the crowd started filling out; not before offering a word of comfort and hug to my weeping mother. I stood beside her, observing a large number of people who came to his funeral but not a soul really knew what Nathan was really like.

I had asked my mother for a private burial ceremony, without the eyes of a thousand strangers staring at the private moment with my brother. She agreed. We drove to the burial ground ten minutes away from the church. The ground was already dug and the coffin was about to be lowered; right beside the grave of our father, who had died only two years ago. I could not help but think the toll all this will take on my mother.

“You would be buried six feet beneath in no time if you would continue performing stunts like these”, he had mocked me, but look how the cards have turned out to be.

He was a bright soul, Nathan. Always laughing and smiling, with a boyish look everybody would fall in love with. He would prank all the people around him with his nonstop antics and creative mind. A crowd favorite was what he was. Want something? Ask Nathan. Are you sad? Go to Nathan.

It was too sudden, too unexpected. We had gathered enough money for the body diagnosis of the entire family. Nathan was diagnosed with cancer. The doctor spoke a lot, diving into the medical terms and what not but the only words that hung to us were ‘untreatable’ and ‘a few years’. With how Nathan had reacted, you would have thought we were just talking about warm weather.

It was an unspoken agreement, to not mention the looming fate. Nathan refused the treatments dismissing them as irrelevant, but deep down he knew the money crunch we were facing. Nothing would budge his decision. He managed to survive two years. In the third year, he started going out less. There were subtle changes. He would complain of being cold all the time and began eating less, unlike the hungry person he always was. Just like that, we saw the brightest soul fading right in front of our eyes.

I went the last to throw the dirt on his coffin, taking my sweet time. It would have been so much less painful had he not been my twin. On his death bed to he would joke, “you can have your own room now” and that was the day I finally broke. Eighteen years of sharing things and suddenly I would enter an empty room for the rest of my life.

All his plans and the trips we had planned together would not take place now. Life had robbed him of his future and us., of him. What we did not have was time, and now, we are also promised that it is time alone that will heal the gnawing pain of this irreplaceable loss.