After spending many a taxing month caring for my grandmother & watching her slowly circle the drain, I had a lot of time to contemplate (occasionally between beers lol) life and grieving the loss thereof.
The more I observe the reactions of those around me, the more I start to notice that in grief, underneath the sadness, under the sense of loss, at it's root...is selfishness. Grief is selfish. Yep, I said it! And the same goes if that person is "religious". I was raised Christian (though, obviously, it didn't quite take lol), and the common notion is that there is no need to fear death and that the end of a person's life doesn't really mean the end. Then why is there so much sadness and grieving at every funeral I've ever been to/seen if this is the belief?
At it's core, grieving the loss of a person has much more to do with the loss of what that person means to the SURVIVORS than it has to do with the actual loss of the person.
If the religious concept of the afterlife is true, then it makes no sense to see it as a sad event...shouldn't the survivors be regarding the passing as "graduating" or "upgrading" the deceased one's existence? The ones who should be sad are US for being stuck HERE, away from where we came from, imprisoned in these finite mortal shells! Returning to where we came from as liberated souls should be a happy concept, the ultimate goal at the end of everyone's life, so much so that sometimes I think that birthdays should be sad instead of funerals. One more year stuck here lol. Well, maybe I wouldn't go that far lol.
When I see people cry at the loss of another's life, it's clear that it has more to do with the loss of what that person means to/did for the survivors...it can range from losing someone that keeps them from being lonely, to losing someone with whom you have invested a lifetime of love, care and money, now gone with nothing to show for it...to losing a source to feeling a certain way (loved, needed, even entertained, etc.)...or in my grandmother's case: the loss of a tangible link to nostalgic past memories. I'd honestly say 8 times out of 10, the reaction to her recent passing makes at least one mention to a past memory she was involved in one way or another. Even I feel that to some degree. The loss of grandma makes me ache for those times I stayed at her place some nights as a kid, her teaching me to cook and make sun tea, learning spanish by watching her novelas along with her, hearing my uncle practice Hendrix on his guitar through the window while I was out back playing with worms & frogs. But those memories are long gone with or without grandma's living. The life of the memories are NOT endangered or lost by the loved one's passing, it only SEEMS that way on a subconscious level because, as I said before, the deceased served as a living, breathing, physical link to those memories/experiences. In a way, it may feel that their death somehow threatens the existence of the memories, making one almost reflexively cling onto both a little too tightly. Also, their death may serve as a sobering confirmation that those times really are long gone, causing one to stir up fears of their own mortality & what little time they might have left. But it's all an illusion. Disassociating the fuzzy memories from the link of the person involved & enjoying the memory "as is" helps with letting go of the deceased. If anything at all, the deceased person is now safer than ever, now resting in as incorruptible a place as the memories that person is linked to.
This is not to say that I believe the selfish nature belying grief is wrong or abnormal...selfishness is natural in limited doses...However, it IS wrong to be stuck in that state, and lacking the ability to see it for what it is. If you consciously attempt to break the link between the nostalgic experience and memory from that person, and put each in it's proper place in your heart, you might find that letting go of that person a bit easier, letting them return home to the liberated state of existence we should all envy.
I guess I had to work that thought out to finally get to sleep. Ok, well, bye!
