People have all sorts of traditions around funerals. A lot
of the time I don’t get them. I imagine that most of the time they’re
constructive – by which I mean that they serve to help grieving people deal with
their loss and move on. And I’m all for that. (I’ll also admit that I haven’t
yet gone through much of this kind of loss, so there could be some perspective
that I’m missing here.) But I worry that sometimes the traditions we follow can
have the opposite effect: they can end up making people worry more than
necessary, in particular about how their actions or lack thereof might affect
the deceased. In particular, I think people end up doing more harm than good
when they treat funeral services like they are meant for the dead rather than
for the living.
A basic principle that I’m quite confident is that once you’re
out of this life, your level of happiness only depends on your relationship
with God, and not on anything that any other person has done or not done. (You
could argue that temple ordinances are an exception to this, but even then I
that the timing we experience here is different from what post-mortal people experience
so let’s ignore that for the moment.)
This principle is really important. Obviously in this life
our happiness is affected by all sorts of things outside our control, from both
human and natural causes. The
Atonement of Christ gets rid of all that and makes happiness available to
everybody And the
Resurrection is guaranteed to everyone. If you know (or even believe) this,
it is a source of comfort, even though it doesn’t immediately take away the
pain of losing someone. That pain is real, which is why it’s important for
people to address it, cope with it, and find ways to move on.
I think that one of the ways that people deal with it is
through traditions that make them feel like they can do something of value for
their departed loved ones. It helps them feel less helpless, more connected. I
suspect that’s why people spend quintuple-digit amounts on caskets, flowers, and
grave sites. It’s why they keep bringing flowers to graves. If that works for
them, great. The problem comes when it becomes difficult or impossible for people to go
through these traditions. I fear that they may end up feeling unnecessarily
guilty for not having done more – or even worse, that they often spend
unnecessary resources to go through with the tradition even when there’s pretty
much no benefit for anyone except those getting paid to provide them.
All of this leads me to have a set of views that some might
see as jaded or even cheap, but the motivation really is to make sure that all
of the traditions we follow are aimed at the grieving family –
because the dead are just fine without these efforts. I’m not judging people
that believe or choose differently. But here they are, for what they’re worth.
- Burial (or whatever): I think all cultures bury
or cremate the remains of people who have died. There’s a good and obvious
reason for this: the human body is sacred, and the image of a friend or family
member has emotional significance. Eventually that body will become part of the
earth and be unrecognizable, but the process that takes it there is essentially
a desecration of the human image. Seeing that would only be hurtful. We want it
to take place out of sight. Now, people (perhaps naturally) add to that sentiment
the idea that the dead person themself needs to have the body buried in a
certain way. What if you can’t do that? What if the body is lost at sea or
destroyed before the ceremony can be performed? If you think the ceremony constitutes
some duty to the dead, you’re going to end up grieving even more – not just for
the loss of that person in your life, but for some imagined suffering that the
person will go through in the next life. That’s really bad! It’s much better if
we just see burial (or cremation or whatever) as a necessary logistical step
and move on, knowing that the person we have lost is just fine.
- Graves: Visiting a grave site is a related
concept. I get that it’s comforting for a lot of people, and that’s great.
There are also a lot of people who can’t visit the grave site of their deceased
family, maybe due to having moved away or something. I sure hope such people don’t
feel distanced from their family because of that. Post-mortal spirits aren’t
attached to their burial sites or even to their former bodies. They’re free
from all that. If there’s an attachment to this world, then surely it’s to the
living family members themselves.
I guess that covers it, actually. We can’t avoid the pain of
losing people to death. But we can make sure that the traditions we follow don’t
add to the burden of those who suffer loss and distract from the hope and peace
that come from knowing that good people who move beyond this life are okay, and
that we will be with them again.
I actually do like the look, in general. The enemies managed to look classic in spite of the 3D cell shading. The robot masters look good too. And there's actually a fair amount of replayability, because the power ups you can get in the item shop are so useful that it kind of makes me wonder how well I'd do without them. Same with the slowing down time thing. In theory, it should be possible to do the game in a more classic style, once you know what to expect.
