This article explores personal perspectives on death and grief, questioning whether people are truly mourning the departed or crying out of their own feelings of loneliness and loss. It is about rethinking the nature of grief as we come to understand and accept the boundaries between life and death.
From a young age, I lived in the same house with my grandparents, but we were not close. They always lived in their own way, and I was naturally distant from their lives. Their lives were in the past, and I was in the process of moving toward the future. We were in the same space, but in different times, and maybe that’s why I didn’t shed a single tear at their funeral. I couldn’t understand the sadness of the guests at the funeral, let alone the tears of my mother, who had been berating my grandparents every day. Was it to set the mood? Or was it because it was the last time they would see each other? It was like a group of babies, when one starts crying, they all start crying. I’m not that old to have been to many funerals, but I think I’ve come to terms with death in my own way. Even now, I don’t think I’d shed a tear if someone died.
Death, according to the dictionary, is the cessation of life. The word seems to have a simple definition, but it has a deep meaning. Death has many connotations, but I like to think of it as a change of relationship. It’s like moving to a different country, moving to a completely different world, whether it’s material or spiritual. It’s just a matter of degree. You can say that you have parted ways with the person who has died. I believe that the grief felt by those who have witnessed someone’s death is a product of the loneliness of being left alone, like a person who has been sentenced to part with a beloved lover. We who are still alive in this world have an obligation to end our lonely lives.
Since childhood, I have often experienced a sense of distance and isolation in my relationships with people, which may have become even more pronounced in my relationship with death. If we consider that those left behind in this world are more difficult and lonely than those who have moved on to the afterlife, we can understand the tears at funerals. People always put their own well-being first, so it’s not your death that makes me cry, but my loneliness. In a way, it is natural that life is sad. When we are born, we experience separation from our parents’ bodies and become completely alone. No one else is like us, and we are never fully understood by anyone. To fully understand another person would be to become that person, and we would not be able to call them another person in the first place. Even if we don’t think about the sincerity of the sympathy or comfort we receive from others, we feel intense loneliness and sadness in our lives. To cope with this sadness, we drink life-threatening amounts of alcohol, endanger ourselves by not letting go of our phones on the street, and destroy our bodies by staying up all night on the computer. We pay with our lives to diminish our sadness. It is perfectly normal and natural to feel sadness in life, and we should accept it for what it is.
Now let’s talk about the grief of the dying. Although the existence of an afterlife cannot be confirmed, if there is an afterlife and thinking is possible after death, the dying person will experience separation. The separation from the world, from people, is relative to the distance between the two, not to who is gone. Since there is no absolute standard of which world is the best, the one who dies is also left alone, and his mood will be lonely and sad.
Life and death are a series of events, and death does not come after life, but simply increases the distance between them. There is a town of death next to a town of life. We living humans have defined the next world (the afterlife) in the absence of information, so we treat it as if it were a sequence of events. It is a landscape on the other side of the wall that no matter how much science advances, it will never be understood. People who are well trained to deal with the sadness of loneliness in life are better able to deal with the loneliness of death. They will be able to accept their own death, as well as the death of others, with humility and dignity. If our expansion of thought were limited to this world, death would be the only sadness. But both life and death are about being alone and lonely, and both were equal from the beginning, so death shouldn’t be more sad, nor should life be less sad.
The Hulk, the green hero of Marvel Comics, becomes a superhero when he gets angry and turns into a green giant. In fact, in his early years, the Hulk couldn’t control his anger and hurt people, but he found a way. He exposes himself to anger as it is. By being angry all the time, he learned to control his powers. Like the Hulk, we need to expose ourselves to sadness and accept the loneliness that comes with life and death as it is. Instead of relying on alcohol or computers to help us cope with our grief, we should become the blue Hulk and feel and enjoy our grief. Then we will be stronger and more peaceful than we are now.
