Anthropologists will tell you every culture has unique ways of facing the loss that death brings to humans. Around the world, there are intricate public rites and rituals which are often enshrined in laws. Just recently a daughter and her partner were convicted by Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court as she had carried out her father's dying wish to have a 'pagan' burial in the woods - she breached the law by failing to register his death and bury him in a permitted place.
Apart from the practices of different cultures and religions, there is a more personal perspective that we all have to bring to death. In an arbitrary world where our futures are far from certain, there is one fact we all have to face and that is our mortality. However, it is not just the question "What happens to me when I die?" We also have to cope with the loss of those close to us when they pass away.
This has become immediately personal as I mourn the loss of my older brother and try to gather my thoughts about the meaning of his life and death. Linked to grief for the reality that I will never see him again is an attempt to understand what his life meant and its impact on me. From contemplating the inevitable cycle of life as if in some distant theoretical discourse, Death stood at last in his true rank and order (as Robert Graves wrote in his poem Pure Death) and it has to be dealt with!
Whether you believe in an afterlife or that once consciousness is lost it is like turning off a light bulb, those of us left behind have to try to make sense of death. Aristotle described death as "the greatest of evils" because the dead could no longer be an agent of activity. Unlike Plato who thought the soul was immortal and returned in different forms, Aristotle stated in his Nicomachean Ethics that the concept of life beyond this earthly existence was an impossibility. However, Aristotle was also positive in that he argued, that the deceased left behind their creative energy - their unique self became completely defined as death established a form of closure. Our story, and it is our species' ability to comprehend the world through stories, comes to an end with our departure from this world. Death ensures there will be no more changes so that our character, our contribution, our value can be finally assessed.
Grief has been categorised as probably the worst psychological pain humans ever have to bear and to ameliorate suffering we need to prepare for the shock, the loss and, so often, the isolation that death brings. Our recollections can be a source of equanimity and pleasure replacing anger and depression.
It also reminds me of my mortality and those projects I desire need to be started and procrastination thrown to one side.
Whatever the future I will always be 'one of three' - my sister, my brother and me!
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