Timothy aubry a matter of life and death

-A matter of life and Death!

This intriguing and sagacious essay is an abstract from the novel “A matter of life and death” by Timothy Aubry. This amusing fiction is based on writer’s perception and experience about married life. The novel engages married people who have same perspective as that of writer’s that once you are married, marriage or to put more accurately, spouse becomes the ultimate object to blame for everything not happening the right way in life. Marriage is just about everything; from worst nightmares of life to the relieve that you have someone by your side to endure with you and your scariest dreams. The author has started this perplexing yet connecting story with a nightmare of a man who choked onto something. He wakes up from sleep in panic, coughing and sweating and wakes up his wife to help him thrust it out. He often dreams about it and wakes up the same way. He has been seeing such dreams from his childhood. His wife often asks him how in dreams he knows that she is sleeping beside him and will save him from dying. This leaves him into deep thoughts of understanding the substance of marriage.

When he was 8, his parents opted to part their ways. He was ill and had high grade fever. His sister was giving him sympathetic looks. He always has been a coward child. May it be monsters hiding under his bed or his firm belief in human intruders, everything used to scare him to death. His sister’s silence and compassionate looks made him believe that he might have cancer and is about to die. He got scared of death. He certainly did not want to die. But under this cover of false fear lay a harsh reality. His parents had decided to part their ways and that was the reason behind his sister’s concerned looks. His mother were sister were waiting for him to recover from his illness before they break the sad news to him. Such incidents in a child’s life often leave deep scratches in his soul. And that’s what happened to him too. He was afflicted deep down to his soul by his parent’s divorce. Subconsciously, he retained this incident throughout his childhood inside his brain. This is from where he started believing that marriage and divorce are synonymous to life and death. Or may be vice versa. He had grownup seeing fights between his parents, till they both parted their ways, even after that too. When his father was on his death bed, fifteen years after his parent’s divorce, his mother wanted to have one last good fight with him. She wanted to pour out all her frustration collected inside her over the span of fifteen years because of a bad marriage that ended into divorce. She wanted someone to blame for everything that went wrong in her life, and his father who was a corpse now, became the target. She yelled at him for leaving them all by themselves. Though he and his sister were technically adults but what his mother could see was two little children sobbing helplessly.

This apparently unsuccessful relationship between his parents made him presume that marriage is technically a problematic relation. Marriage denotes helplessness of a person who gets involved into a relationship that has no end till death do them apart. It’s like a train that has no stop. No other event or commitment in a person’s life is longer or larger than life itself. Every decision in a person’s life comes with a liberty of choices to change or quit whenever desirable but only marriage has no inevitable escape. May it be getting admission into a college or buying a house or a car, getting a job or making new friends, everything is replaceable in life. You can walk away from anything you don’t want to face again and never bother to look back at it, but only marriage bounds you to a person till death. You cannot opt to run away from it. Even if you do, just like his parents, you might end up one day blaming each other for all the worse things that have occurred to you in your entire life. Because that’s the good part about marriage, “it gives you someone to blame- for just about everything”. When you are not married, you have plenty of opportunities lying ahead in front of you. You can walk, run or drift in any direction you want. Even if you sit idle and do nothing, you blame yourself. You blame life. You have plenty of other things to play the blame games with. But once you are married, the only thing responsible for creating all the hindrances in your path is nothing else but your marriage.

But does marriage really insulates one’s life? Does it really limit down the possibilities to enjoy and live life? Does marriage really turns life into a monotonous state of affairs? Does it really sequester one’s life all the way up against the boundaries of one’s existence? Is marriage the sole reason behind dullness and despair in a married person’s life? Or it may be just that you get someone to direct all your indignant feelings towards in the form of your spouse. Your significant other with all his sound mind chooses to endure all the acrimony in you for years to come, but the deep and intense urge in you to pronounce your partner guilty for all your life’s faults doesn’t let you feel thankful for their altruism. Marriage actually is bliss. You get someone to blame and annoy for the rest of your life. When your life doesn’t go your way, you have your spouse to put all the blame onto, or may be to support you and be by your side through thick and thin. What if one chooses to stay single all his life? Whom would he turn to, to tell all the events of day or share all the despair of the week?

When he was at the perk of his nightmare and about to choke to death, his wife brought him back to life. That’s what she often does. She pulls him back to the real world from his unworldly place where he gets jumbled with life and death. His memories haunt him in his dreams. What if he wakes up one day, breathless and choking to death, and doesn’t found his wife sleeping next to him, will he be able to convince himself that it is just a nightmare? No he won’t. Thanks to his wife, he always regains his sense of reality and realizes that he is not dead. She gives him relief from his haunting dilemma of death.

The author has very well written this kairotic novel keeping in focus the main problem for unsuccessful marriages these days. The atrocity of our time is the mindset we carry. There was a time when getting married and procreate was an obligation, that people happily used to do. People were in need of partners to get settled with and procreate, thus making a happy family. Striving for their needs and living for them was the main goal for many. People nowadays have perception that marriage is a ride on a train going through a dark endless tunnel. Not many are willing to get bound in such a relationship from which they cannot opt out without having some acrimonious reminiscences. People presume and blame marriage and their spouses for limited possibilities they see after marriage. But this is a mere illusion. Marriage expands your circle of possibilities actually; you have someone to stand by your side through all good times and bad. You get to share their circle of opportunities with yours thus amplifying the circle of life and not vice versa. The monotonous routine people experience after marriage is not because the marriage has created a tedium environment for them to live in, but because they don’t strive to turn this monotony into an excited journey for both, themselves and their significant others. They give up considering marriage as a culprit. Marriage or no marriage, you get to face many problems in every field of life. But the agitation we carry within ourselves makes us frustrated with everything we get bound to, willingly or not. The failures we experience in our lives, the hopes that get shattered, the broken promises and unsuccessful relationships all create a chaos inside us. And then amidst of everything, life gives us someone to blame for these. Many of us perceive marriage as a forced obligation and not as an approach to improve the quality of life. The author has well used the example of nightmare to describe how essential the presence of the man’s wife is in his life. Though it was a mere nightmare, but it evoke a sense of affirmation within himself that he has got someone by his side to pull him back to the real world and did not let him die of choking. He is relieved to know that his wife shall be by his side always.