brixtonscot
Well-Known Member
School of Life on death of a loved one….
Someone we loved so much has died. It can be hard to know where to turn. For religions, dying was regarded as an essential, immensely important, part of existence; it was supposed to happen at a time appointed by God or by fate.
It was not an embarrassing or despair-inducing end point, it was a transformation: the soul would continue its life in another form or in another place. Those who died had only ‘departed’ and lived on elsewhere. Perhaps after our own death, our souls would be reunited with theirs.
By contrast, in modernity, death cannot help but come across as an insult. It is a fundamental rebuke to meritocracy, progress, technology and individualism; it is a failure of independence.
Modernity has prolonged our lives but it has also taken away the consolations that religion used to offer at their inevitable terminations.
Here is a set of thoughts we might turn over in our minds to soften our grief and accompany our tears:
The Surreal Nature of Death
Death is at once the strangest and most normal thing that can happen in a life.
A beloved of infinitely complex consciousness no longer exists; atoms arranged in an inexorably unique sequence are now forever dispersed.
The moment seems like a rebuke to everything we are and hope for; it is contrary to all the stability and continuity we crave - but it was preordained from the moment of birth.
Nothing fundamentally heinous has happened. There was never going to be another way - and they knew it, as we do.
The death feels so wrong but death is written into the contract of existence.
What has happened is an outrage and at the same time the fulfilment of a basic pledge we all undertook at the moment of our birth.
It is life, not death, that is the anomaly. Death is our one great common destiny, the event from which all our love and compassion flows. We miss them so much.
When Someone We Love Has Died - The School Of Life
Someone we loved so much has died. It can be hard to know where to turn. For religions, dying was regarded as an essential, immensely important, part of existence; it was supposed to happen at a time appointed by God or by fate.
It was not an embarrassing or despair-inducing end point, it was a transformation: the soul would continue its life in another form or in another place. Those who died had only ‘departed’ and lived on elsewhere. Perhaps after our own death, our souls would be reunited with theirs.
By contrast, in modernity, death cannot help but come across as an insult. It is a fundamental rebuke to meritocracy, progress, technology and individualism; it is a failure of independence.
Modernity has prolonged our lives but it has also taken away the consolations that religion used to offer at their inevitable terminations.
Here is a set of thoughts we might turn over in our minds to soften our grief and accompany our tears:
The Surreal Nature of Death
Death is at once the strangest and most normal thing that can happen in a life.
A beloved of infinitely complex consciousness no longer exists; atoms arranged in an inexorably unique sequence are now forever dispersed.
The moment seems like a rebuke to everything we are and hope for; it is contrary to all the stability and continuity we crave - but it was preordained from the moment of birth.
Nothing fundamentally heinous has happened. There was never going to be another way - and they knew it, as we do.
The death feels so wrong but death is written into the contract of existence.
What has happened is an outrage and at the same time the fulfilment of a basic pledge we all undertook at the moment of our birth.
It is life, not death, that is the anomaly. Death is our one great common destiny, the event from which all our love and compassion flows. We miss them so much.
When Someone We Love Has Died - The School Of Life
Last edited:
