The Story of the Children's Deaths
The death of a child is always a model for the death of the parent. A mother gives birth in order to give life to her child; a son dies in order to shape the death of its father. When the son dies before the father, the father's death is widowed; it will be crippled, without a model. That is why we demons die so easily: we have no offspring, no model has been set for our death. People without children die easily because their entire endeavor in eternity is just a single extinguishment in a single instant. In short, the future deaths of children are mirrored in the deaths of parents, like a two-way law. Only death is inherited backward, against the matrix of time, passed on from young to old, from son, to father--ancestors inherit death from descendants like a rank of nobility. The heredity cell of death--the coat of arms of destruction--follows the course of time from the future into the past, linking death with birth, time with eternity, Adam Ruhani with himself. Death, therefore, falls within the nature of an inherited family phenomenon. This is not a matter of inheriting black eyelashes or catching chicken pox. It is a question of how the individual experiences death, not what he dies from. A man may die by the sword, from disease, or from old age, but he always experiences something different in the process. It is always somebody else's future death he experiences, never his own: as we said, the death of his children. He turns death into a common, family affair so to speak. A childless person will have only his own death. Just that one. Conversely, a person who has children will not have his own but his children's deaths, many times over. The death of people with many people is terrible, because it multiplies, since life and death need not be in a ratio of one to one. I'll give you an example. Many centuries ago, a monk by the name of Mokaddasa Al-Safer lived in a Khazar monastery. The way he prayed in the course of his long life in the monastery, where there were ten thousand virgins, was to impregnate all those nuns. And he had as many children. Do you know what he dies of? He swallowed a bee. And do you know how he died? He died in ten thousands ways at once; he had ten-thousand-fold death. He died once for each of his children. They did not have to bury him. His deaths tore him into such shreds that nothing was left of him except this story.
It's like that well-known fable about the bundle of sticks, a fable you humans misunderstand. The father on his deathbed who summons his sons and shows them how easy it is to break a single rod, is really showing them how easy it is for a person with one son to die. And when the father shows his sons how hard it is to break a bundle of sticks, he is really showing them what a hard job it will be for him to die. He is showing how painful it is when you leave behind many children, when their deaths proliferate, because the father experiences all their agonies beforehand. The more sticks in the bundle, the more vulnerable you are, not stronger. Not to mention the death of women and their offspring--that is an entirely different breed, not of the same variety as the deaths of men, and therefore it follows different laws. . . .