By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: July 5, 2005

I knew a man who kept the bones of this wife wrapped in a white bandanna. He would take these pieces out – pieces of her fingers, the fragments of bones – and play with them like a jigsaw puzzle while he cried so silently. Once he put her hand together, he press his hand down on the fragments of bone, closed his eyes and whispered something. I do not know what he whispered. He was not religious, but it seems like he was praying to something. Prayer comes so naturally to those around death. It is the only way to understand it – by appealing to forces that we cannot prove or know to exist – only through the forces of nothing do we understand nothing itself; the dying cannot do anything but pray. Everything they do becomes a prayer. The brushing of teeth is no longer to what it is to the living (to fight tooth decay), it becomes a symbolic gesture of wanting to hold on. Praying is all the dying do.