An unfortunate aspect of living in a culture which values “gains” or “wins” or “profits” at nearly any price over losses is that the process of dealing with profound loss, the grief process, is too often glossed over as a temporary emotional disorder which should be over in a week or two or can be cleared up by getting a prescription for the appropriate medication. Although your boss at work may be quite compassionate about you taking a short leave of absence for dealing with the funeral, she or he will probably want you back to normal and productive as soon as possible. The experience of profound loss is viewed as losses are generally, a temporary setback. Soon you’ll recover and be back there being productive and meeting deadlines again and effectively spending your leisure time watching television, drinking light beer, and shopping at the malls.
Death however is not interested in maintaining a healthy economy. And you may find that your experience of grief effects and possibly changes you in a fundamental way that you may not be able to describe but which you are aware of. When a loved one dies such as a mother, father, sibling, husband, wife or son or daughter, there is some aspect of you that is them and is now gone. Although he or she is gone, their absence is as real as their physical presence was when they were alive. Their absence is a hole somewhere deep inside of you that you know will remain empty for the rest of your life.
The experience of that “hole” can be extremely disturbing. Suddenly you have become aware that our experience of others is finite, and yet at the same time there is something in our experience of each other that is not. While someone is alive, the superficial aspects of their presence is often taken for granted, the surface personality that we interact with in most circumstances. Once they are no longer alive and the superficial aspect is no longer physical presence, then the experience of grief, of profound loss, of this realization of a hole in our self that can never again be filled, can suddenly bring forth a realization that there is a deeper communion between ourselves and those around us, that we are not the commercially individualist and independent beings that our culture seems to hold that we are. The sense of loss can be so profound as to awaken an unconscious sense of interdependence between yourself and the one who has died – an interdependence that is suddenly realized as being biological, emotional, and spiritual.
If through grief the realization of the contradictory aspects of the finality of death and the seemingly eternal quality of some part of ourselves in relationship to others can occur, then it may be possible for this to serve as an orientation for exploring teachings and knowledge that may be able to explain or provide understanding of – or even a reconciliation of – death and life.
In our culture, there are dominant religious institutions which lay claim to having the ultimate knowledge of death and life. Unfortunately, in the process of becoming dominate in the secular world, these same religious institutions have by and large become as obsessed with gaining, winning and material success as the culture at large and correspondingly as lacking in depth, insight or useful knowledge with regards to profound loss as the culture at large.
When death becomes recognized as an aspect of the Eternal through profound loss, then Sunday sermons on the morals of whatever group is the current threat to family values comes across as lacking in coherence and meaning.
The quest for knowledge then begins in earnest. We are fortunate in that the dramatic increase in our ability to communicate information, through all media, in this century has also meant the wide availability and distribution of knowledge, teachings, traditions from around the world, from different cultures, which bring a different perspective on death and life; and the experiences of those within western culture who have explored deeply within the meaning and experience of their own lives. -ME
