Death. It’s always depicted as having many faces. But more complex than death, I think, are the dimensions before it.

Death itself is finality; it is the totality of possibility and the acceptance of the end. But before the coming of death, there is the fearful hope, the shaking prayer, the persevering faith that you and your loved ones can conquer this horrible happening, and come back to normal life again. What is before death is entirely more intriguing.

The waiting room of a hospital, in my opinion, is enveloped more in this blanket of before-death lingering fear and hope than with the undeniable stench of death. For death knows it is to wander in the funeral homes, and the scared hope knows it is to dwell within the wards of a hospital.

The waiting room, I guess, has seen all the possible emotions of human conscience, as have airports, wartime, and any other extreme, catastrophic circumstance. But even in this place, where humanity stripped bare is supposed to look its most ideal, where strangers condole with crying families, and feel happy from a distance for those celebrating, where all ranks of society should be broken so that we all sit in one singular united human form. Even here, all the evils of our race prevail just as well.

Petty mischiefs like seats being saved, marked and stolen. The mental states of other groups of families are disturbingly ignored, and private spaces are frustratingly infiltrated. Even just outside of the ICU, the filth of our race can find ways to harass others. In a place where you’re already vulnerable, scared and uneasy, this filth of our race will make that environment uncomfortable for you. And of all places, hospitals show how strongly our social ranks hold, and how they are usually the difference between life and death.

But then again, can we really blame ‘the people’ for these flaws? Where is one supposed to look to get a solution to these problems? I mean, if we all had clean wards and spotless waiting areas with actually useable washrooms, would everyone also become angelic and well-mannered?

Can we blame the people, in a region where affordable education is basically useless, where provision of medical services and availability of medical equipment is segregated by ‘rank’, ‘contacts’ and ‘protocol’, where the decision to consume fluids or food has to be weighed strenuously because using the public washroom is simply out of question.

And I guess that the answer is, we can to some extent, because the backwardness of all these institutions of ours is only partly due to lack of education. And then the argument is that uneducated people can also show basic decency and nice manners.

At the end of the day, the hospital will fundamentally continue its purpose of trying to save the lives of the unwell. And the waiting room will continue to be the place where families and friends gather. Sometimes food is passed along the seats, sometimes the duas and daroods echo silently in halls. The happiness of a relieving end for some, the hope of the possibility for others, and the crushing fear of the inevitable, all form the heavy blanket which will always choke the air in The Waiting Room.

Thanks for your somber reading time.