Death is the ultimate grief. Or is it? Is it really worse than losing someone who is still alive but refuses to be in your life?
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A few years back, I used to take a walk in a cemetery once a quarter. Always during the day because I’m a scaredy-cat, as one of my exes who loved horror movies used to say. I’d walk the sprawling gardens, enjoying the flowers but not smelling them, imagining stories of people under the headstones. The wonder of a human life and the demise we’re all promised at the end. I need to get back to that habit.
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In spiritual teachings, they say death is not to be feared. It’s just a transition to the other side, a transition of our soul and energy from one form to another. But I guess contemplating your own death or that of a highly intertwined person is altogether another matter, a pressing matter, a matter of confusing sorts.
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The closest people I have lost to death are my three grandparents, who I believe are with me whenever I need them now. Every other death has been once removed. This is the edge of the cliff I’m standing on now.
More than their transition, I fear not settling karma with people while they’re alive. (But this might change when I find my next long-term partner and grow old with them.) For me, “settling karma” is often one-sided. It doesn’t mean a throwdown, telling everyone who hurt me how much they did. It’s speaking up or not based on the other party’s capacity to hold the truth and empathizing with them, while setting boundaries to protect myself. It’s learning what my soul came here to learn so the same lessons won’t come back in my next lifetime. So the same karmic bonds don’t reattach to me in the same shade of dark.
If I loved them deeply, I want to do my best so they get to die knowing that I loved them. If I couldn’t get myself to love them fully, I still want them to die knowing I accepted them as they are but have no intention of meeting them in any other lifetime. Bon voyage!
This is also the edge of the cliff I’m standing on now.
