Dear reader,The first act of death I saw was not a human’s. It was a plant’s. A Siam Weed, or appa in Malayalam, though in my part of central Kerala, the bushy green herb went by a fonder name: Communist Pacha—the Communist Green. I was in lower primary school. That summer, one had bloomed along a fragile fence on the left side of our small house. It had fuzzy, arrow-shaped leaves that gave off a pungent, lovely odour when crushed, and it put out tiny white flowers tinged with lilac. If you watched it against a sunset, it was beautiful. I watched it for weeks. It helped me kill a wretched childhood loneliness.My mother had taught me not to pluck flowers, so I’d stand next to it and peer into the little blossoms, blowing softly and imagining a fragrance. The breeze would give the plant nudges and nods, and from above—if you’d placed a camera over us—it would have looked as though we were having a conversation. It became a friend.One morning, I found it on the ground, flowers wilted, like a small relic. I sat near it, eyes stinging, and let out a sob that caught the attention of my grandfather, who had just walked in visiting. He was blunt. “It slept,” he said. He was very specific. He used the word sleep. Not died, not perished. A verb I connected to the most mundane daily activity. After many awkward pauses, he added, “Everything goes into that sleep.” I looked at him with a why. “So it can wake up elsewhere as something.” He continued with a smile. “Everything becomes something else in the course of time. They must. So when the time is ready, they sleep. This time in sleep, they get rid of all memories, so they can be fresh and wake up as something else somewhere. Otherwise, living will be so boring.” He chuckled.“So nobody dies?” I asked. “Never!” He was entirely convinced. “We’re all going to be here, forever. We can’t escape!” He laughed. I wondered where my plant would rise again. Would it bloom in my yard? Would it remember me? The sadness returned.I have been thinking about this exchange a lot in recent weeks. It is hard not to, given the world we are in. As I write this, a war rages across West Asia. More than a thousand people have been killed in Iran since late February, among them over two hundred children. Hospitals have been bombed, residential areas flattened, and oil facilities set alight, filling the skies of Tehran with toxic smoke. In Lebanon, hundreds more are dead. Across the Gulf, across borders, the machinery of death is running at full tilt. And it all happens at a distance for most of us, filtered through screens and headlines, each death reduced to a number in a ticker.I should say that I am a rationalist with no faith to speak of, which makes it odd that the most useful thing anyone has told me about death came from a man who believed, cheerfully and without evidence, that nobody dies.I don’t pretend to have a philosophy of death. I’m not sure anyone does, in the honest sense of the word. What I have is a handful of images and sentences that have stayed with me, starting with my grandfather’s. He was a man with no formal education who happened to hand me, without knowing it, a version of one of the oldest ideas in the subcontinent—punarbhava, again-becoming. The Kathopanishad has a young boy named Nachiketa confront Yama, the god of death, and asks him point-blank: what happens after we die? Yama’s answer, stripped of its theological apparatus, is that the self cannot be destroyed. It changes form. It moves. My grandfather would have put it simpler: it sleeps, and it wakes.The Buddhist tradition pushes back at even this consolation. In the doctrine of anattā—no-self—there is nothing permanent that transmigrates. No soul catches the next bus. What continues is more like a river: you can name it, but the water you named three hundred years ago is gone. Something passes on, but nothing stays. This is, if you sit with it, a harder comfort. My plant might wake up elsewhere, but it would not know me. The relationship dies even if the matter doesn’t. I think of the families in Tehran and Beirut and across the bombed-out cities of this war. The person they lost had a particular laugh, a particular way of making tea. That is what is gone. No metaphysics brings it back.And yet we keep reaching for metaphors. The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, in his novel Death and the Gardener, watches his father die of cancer over a single winter and arrives at a sentence that has the force of a prayer: “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.” The father spent his last decades tending a patch of earth in a small Bulgarian town, growing tomatoes, peppers, roses. He spoke through the garden, Gospodinov writes, and his words were apples and cherries. After his death, the son sees that the garden will bloom again in spring, indifferent to who owns it. And he grasps something that plants understand better than we do. Gospodinov calls it a botanical idea—they know how to die in such a way that they can come back to life again.My Communist Pacha was a weed that knew this trick. Native to the Americas, it had crossed oceans and taken root in Kerala’s fallow land, blooming and dying and returning without fuss, season after season. It taught me, before I had the words for it, what Gospodinov’s father taught him through tomatoes: that the border between life and death is not a wall but a membrane. I’m not sure I fully believe it. But the idea has for sure had an impact on me.What I’m more certain about is the other side of this question—not what death means, but how we handle it. Modern societies, particularly in the industrialised world, have worked hard to push death out of view. The sociologist Norbert Elias argued in The Loneliness of the Dying that as communities became more individualised, dying was gradually removed from the household and handed over to institutions—hospitals, machines, professionals. The dying person was isolated. Death became an embarrassment, a clinical failure, rather than a passage to be witnessed and attended to by the people who loved you. Back home in India, until not very long ago, people died at home, surrounded by relatives, with rituals that gave the process a grammar and a pace. That world is receding fast.The Swedish novelist Lars Gustafsson, in The Death of a Beekeeper, wrote about a schoolteacher dying of cancer who refuses to hand his remaining time to the impersonality of a hospital. He stays in the Swedish countryside, alone with his bees and his notebooks. His pain colours the landscape in strange ways—certain trees mark the spots where it had hurt most. The novel is a calm, stubborn argument for dying on your own terms, in a place you know, among things that are yours.On Tuesday (March 24), Harish Rana died at AIIMS Delhi. He was 31. He had been in a vegetative state for over 13 years since a fall from a fourth-floor balcony in 2013 left him with severe brain injuries. He was a BTech student at Panjab University. For over a decade, machines kept him alive. His family kept hope alive alongside the machines—marking festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries by his bedside. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court of India, in a landmark ruling, permitted the withdrawal of clinically assisted nutrition so that, in the court’s words, “the process of death may take place with dignity.” He was shifted to the palliative care unit at AIIMS on March 14. The withdrawal began shortly after. Ten days later, he breathed his last.The court’s words to the Rana family were careful and kind. “This decision can feel like an act of surrender,” the bench said, “but we believe it is, in truth, an act of profound compassion and courage. You are not giving up on your son. You are allowing him to leave with dignity.” It is impossible to read this without feeling the heaviness of what it cost Ashok and Nirmala Rana to arrive at this point. Thirteen years of sitting by a bed. Thirteen years of talking to someone who could not answer. And then the decision to stop.This is where philosophy meets the ground. The grand questions—whether the self survives, whether matter reconstitutes, whether we wake up as something else somewhere—matter less, finally, than the plain ones. How do we die? Where? In whose company? With what dignity? And who decides? These are not abstract questions. They are questions that families face in hospital corridors at two in the morning, when a doctor asks them what they want done.We owe the dying more than metaphysics. We owe them small, concrete dignities: clean sheets, managed pain, a hand to hold, the right to be in a place they recognise.Harish Rana’s case has opened a door in India’s legal and moral landscape. But the room behind it is vast and mostly dark. If how we die tells us something about how we live, then we should be asking harder questions about end-of-life care—about who gets it, who doesn’t, and why. That conversation, long overdue, is the subject of this essay by Roop Gursahani, Raj Mani, and Nagesh Simha, which we carried this week. You must read it along with V. Venkatesan’s analysis of the court ruling.Until next time, and if my grandfather was right, there will always be a next time, whether we remember it or not.Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor, FrontlineWe hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.inCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS