The clock ticks with each and every second that passes. Babies are born, old people die. The air is contaminated, water is worse than alcohol, food is poison. Somewhere else, that food is to be died for. Newborns don’t get enough; criminal masterminds bathe in gold. Though unfair, life goes on, so does the suffering.

Rich get richer, poor stay poor. ‘Mom, I’m hungry,’ the little boy moans.

The mother has ten children to feed, no one to provide. She’s unemployed because she lives in the so-called developed country where looks count; and she’s jobless because she’s pregnant with another baby, possibly even twins. After being abandoned by her husband with five kids, alone and all on her own, she became a prostitute. She works, gets pregnant, starves herself, gives birth; just like that, the circle never comes to an end. She hopelessly regrets her dream of being a mother. Had she decided to stay single and build her career, life would have been so much better.

But Lily knows it wouldn’t be. Eternally unfair things never get better. After working hard for forty-two years, she is left with no friends, no family, nothing but her life and her bright career. But she can’t work anymore, not now that her life and her career are taken away from her in shape of a life-threatening diagnosis of lung cancer; and there is no way out, no escape of the horror of death. With no one to say goodbye to, Lily dies on the hospital bed, wishing it could have been better.

***

“People are always wishing things they can never get.” It is a twelve-year-old girl’s diary. “I can never know, but I was just wondering what kind of memories I would leave behind if I die soon…it is not that I’m wishing for death or anything; I’m just trying to imagine what would happen. And…and would they think I was a hero? Would they remember how I smiled, was a bookworm or took pictures with a frog? Would they tell their kids what a lovely child I was? Or would it’ll be on the contrary? Would I be erased from their memories and hearts, just like many other things are? Or they would fake my memory and life would go on? What…what would happen to my parents? Would they continue living normally or die of my pain? Would there be any pain at all? Would they be okay? What about my friends? Would they turn out to be faux or true? Would I mean anything in their lives, or would I be just a worthless girl who had a nasty habit of reading books? Would those celebrities ever come to know that how much I owed to them? How much my parents’ lives would change? Would anyone bother to read what I wrote in my diaries? Who will tell the animals and birds that the girl who cared about them is no more? Will the world change after me or be the same? Will there be war or peace? Whose death would I die; Nelson Mandela, Adolf Hitler or one of the dead in the World War II? Would someone even bother to shed a tear when I die like my grandma does all the time about her sister, or would they heartlessly say my funeral prayer and thank God for kicking me out of their little miserable lives? I wonder…will I be a bothering blur in their lives or a grain of sand they once stepped on? Will I be one of the little things that matter or the big things that do not matter? Will my pain demand to be felt? Will my infinity be larger than the others? Will anyone ever try to repair the broken strings inside me? Would my last words matter, or worse, would I ever have any?

I wish I could know. I wish I could write a story about it. I wish…But will any of it matter? Won’t they be responsible for what they did? Yes, but still I wish I could know what would happen. Another wish impossible to come true.

They say in death things become clear. I hope they really do. Maybe only death can answer all these questions. Maybe, just maybe. I wish.” Her diary ends with a full stop, her day with tears in her eyes. She wishes she can get the answers.

Four hundred miles away, Harry knows the answers. It has been about twenty-four hours since he has been on the ventilator. When he arrived there, only two percent of his brain was working. Now it isn’t working at all, but he’s still alive. Somehow. But he knows that the time has come.

The last seven minutes of his life are here. It is all a blur, but he can clearly remember walking out of the restaurant feeling full, the fullness reminding him of the satisfaction he feels with his mother and two sisters, and the satisfaction taking his thoughts from the alive to the dead: his father. He remembers the days he had to come to his mother’s aid and say, ‘Dad, please don’t hurt her.’ The same dad would hit Harry with his belt, and as long as his mother was safe he was fine.

A whole decade later, Harry’s father is on the hospital bed. ‘There are people,’ he says. ‘People in white. They want to get me out of here.’ The doctors say he is going crazy, but deep down everyone knows he’s going to die.

As death takes the soul out of the old man, slowly and painfully, the truth starts to hit him. Years later, his son Harry would see the same truth. But it is a secret: to know it, you have to sacrifice your life.

Life. It is slowly becoming a memory now. Doctors are talking, his family is crying and his friends are praying for a miracle to happen. A miracle. His fiancée tries to bargain with God: One thousand pounds for a miracle. Nothing works, and it never will.

The answer is there for Harry, but he doesn’t want it. Once it has happens, once the dead is surely dead, the pain starts to feel okay. It feels okay. Weeks after months after years after years, the dead are surely for sure dead. They are forgotten, buried under the dry soil of the graveyard, gone forever. It doesn’t matter who dies, what matters is that who is alive, because people forget their dead.

***

Death smiles. People get hurt, people die, people stop. But when life is hurt and dead, it still keeps going. Life is floating lifeless. Death smiles again.