Traditions around mourning and loss

Mourning the loss of someone you love is difficult and painful. Various cultures and religions have developed traditions designed to help people through the process. I'd never want to change a person's perspective on their loss (or death, afterlife, etc.) if it's helping them grieve, cope, and move on. But sometimes we hear a sentiment that was helpful to one person, and we repeat it like it's a universal truth, and it ends up hurting others. Sometimes it hurts them by adding to their emotional burden, and sometimes it goes beyond that and causes people to feel like they need to make major sacrifices of time or other opportunities. When that happens, I think it's important to back up and focus on the most fundamental truths, and set the additional traditions aside.

I say that with the understanding that what I consider truth will be considered just another tradition to many. That is fine - the same principle applies. The main idea is to avoid holding on to sentiments or expectations that increase the burden on grieving people, in the name of helping them or the people they have lost.

I'll get to what I think are the essential principles, but first, here are some examples of the problem:

• Sometimes someone will die doing some kind of recreational activity, and people will say something like "He died doing what he loved." If that makes their family feel better, great. But what happens to the family of someone who died of a slow disease, having experienced pretty much no happiness at all for a long time before they died? If it's good when someone dies quickly after enjoying something, then is it bad when that doesn't happen?

• Sometimes someone will ask, "What if the last thing you said to that person is the last thing you ever say?" If your last words to someone were trivial, or worse, regrettable, is that going to be a source of ongoing pain for them?

• The same thing applies to all of our funeral traditions, really. Funeral homes sell coffins that are nice looking and padded on the inside, so that they would be comfortable to lie in. Cemeteries sell plots of land with nice views. People decorate memorial services with flowers. All of these things are fine if they help the grieving people. Physical objects can give people something to focus their faith on, or even to distract them from some of the realities of what they are experiencing. But what happens when someone dies far from home? What happens when the family could provide those luxuries, but at a cost that would create a heavy financial burden?

• One more: Say someone is suffering from a terminal disease. Mentally, they are not themselves, and they might not even be fully aware of what is happening. There's no cure, but death might be months away, or years. Just how much of a sacrifice should their family and friends make to be with that person? How important is it that they have someone with them when they die?

Here are the basic principles as I see them:

• In this life, a person's happiness can be affected by a lot of things beyond their control. Other people's choices and random chance can make bad things happen to good people. But once we leave this world, that isn't true anymore. As soon as someone leaves mortality, their level of happiness is gated only on their relationship with the source of happiness, God. (Of course they can still be disappointed by the choices their family makes, if it leads them to unhappiness. But empathy isn't the same as direct personal suffering.)
• If we accept that, then nothing a living person does can take happiness away from someone who has died. Nothing that is done to the body can limit the happiness of the deceased - not even a little bit. Of course, that implies that it can't help them either, and that, I think, is why we have all of these traditions in the first place. We want to feel like we can help. But really, all of the traditions we have are for us, not them. They serve to help the living grieve. And if a tradition does not meet that goal, it should be discarded. Because the person who has died doesn't need it. They are doing just fine.

• We talk about a person having a soul or a spirit, but that's not really right. A person is a soul. They have a body, during mortality and after resurrection. In-between, they do not have a body. The body left behind is not part of the person; it's part of the earth. The number of people buried in any cemetery is zero.
• The way my son talks about this is to refer to our bodies as mech suits that we pilot. If you saw a place with a bunch of empty mech suits, you wouldn't say "wow, that's a lot of dead people".
• This does not mean that deceased people have no connection to this world. I don't pretend to know the details about that. But I am confident that to whatever extent your loved ones are connected to this world, they are connected to you, wherever you are, and not to a location that happens to have several atoms that used to be part of their body.

• We humans put a lot of emphasis on firsts and lasts. We remember beginnings and endings more than the stuff in the middle. This is true of stories, and material we've studied, and memories of our own lives. And so we naturally get hung up on the end of a person's life - their final moments, or days, or even years. If someone dies in a horrible and unexpected way, we might fear that the person is sort of stuck in that moment, since we can't see them recover. But of course, that's not true at all. The purpose of life is about who we become. It's about the choices we make. And since people aren't usually making a lot of choices at the end of their lives (unless they are sacrificing themselves for someone else), the final day of a person's life might actually be the least important day. You can bet that the person isn't dwelling on the suffering and loss they felt on that day. They have moved on.

If we can let go of the need to feel useful to the person who has died, and of the fear that they might still be suffering the way they were when they were last here, I think that opens up a lot of doors. It won't make the pain of losing someone go away, but it will avoid adding to that pain with unnecessary rhetoric.

It also makes the answers to the questions above a lot clearer.

• It doesn't matter if someone didn't die doing something they loved.
• It doesn't matter if your last words to them weren't special, or even if they were something you regret saying. They will remember the whole relationship, not a single moment.
• For funeral and burial services, you should do exactly what will help you and those most affected by the loss, and not a bit more. No sacrifice should be made for the comfort of the deceased. They're better off than any of us.
• If you didn't make it to their bedside before they died, you haven't committed some eternal sin. The relationship is just paused, and the gap won't even seem that big a hundred years from now.
• You should visit gravesites when and only when it will be helpful to you, and never out of a sense of duty.
• When someone is dying, of course it's good to see to their comfort, but the living shouldn't be making unreasonable sacrifices to optimize for a person's final days. I know this one is controversial, because the person is still alive, so you actually can affect their happiness to some extent. But if you help out the dying person for a couple of days in a way that traumatizes you for years, or that incurs an expense that you'll spend years paying back, then that's not a very good exchange. They are going to recover for free; we need to keep living with the mortal consequences. So we should take those consequences into account.

Some of that might sound jaded and insensitive, and I admit that in the moment I'm writing this, I haven't suffered a major loss like the ones I'm talking about. But I have been around enough to be aware of damage to people still around that came as a result of rhetoric and decision around the loss of someone close to them. And maybe the times when we're not in the middle of it are the best times to reflect on the principles involved, so we can avoid having to carry that extra cultural burden when the loss does happen. Hopefully the principles here are helpful to someone. And if they're not helpful to you, you should disregard them, just like any tradition.