“I will be going back to my village tomorrow. My brother has died, and I need to be there for a few days,” our cook announced matter-of-factly as he brought me breakfast.

“Oh no!” I exclaimed, my hands instinctively coming up to my heart as I connected with his inevitably deep grief. “I’m so sorry. That’s horrible. Oh no. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Anyway, he was old, and it is all in God’s plan,” he replied stoically, definitely not reeling in the ocean of grief I’d expected.

Our cook is around my age, maybe a couple of years older. I didn’t ask exactly how old his brother was, but he was certainly younger than sixty, probably mid-fifties.

Before moving to India twenty-five years ago, and even since then whenever I find myself moored to my Western understandings about life and death, death seems like an unequivocally horrible calamity. Unless of course one is very sick and suffering, any death before a very ripe old age (which to me means at least late 80s or even 90s) is a tragedy. A grave tragedy.