Death, Loss And Grief Shape Us Into Who We Are
Learn to embrace your pain and welcome your new you
Are you fed up with bad news?
There’s always something, isn’t there?
Can you imagine a world without disasters, pain and death?
I certainly can’t. Not only because it’s not realistic but also because it is harmful.
If you don’t believe me, read this article:
When you avoid pain, you are neglecting a part of what makes you who you are.
The pandemic showed us the uglier face of being human, and I’m not talking about what the illness did to our bodies and families. I am talking about some people’s selfish behaviours.
Just to give you a couple of examples
Example 1
My family and I suffered the crazy parties of our three new neighbours for a whole year.
They lived in the next-door house and every other week they invited around twenty people who smoked dope, drank like troopers, peed in the garden, and shouted to each other across the property as if they were in Ibiza because of their hyper-loud disco music, sung out loud, and the list goes on.
All that from eleven at night until five or six in the morning, on average. Sometimes they started in the late afternoon.
We rang the police many times, we had glasses thrown at us with beer or pee, we’re not sure which.
The day after, all they could say was:
We are young. We are in this house to have parties. The pandemic is the one to blame. You should understand.
To which our answer was:
- The pandemic is not only affecting you
- Being young is not a synonym for being rude
Thankfully they have finally left. Not without destroying the rented house they were living in.
The owner is taking them to court. Even the police will testify due to their aggressive behaviour towards the authority.
Example 2
Family and friends went out to restaurants when it still wasn’t safe.
Their argument:
The house is falling on me
Bear with me.
I understand that certain groups of people need human contact and assistance. I also know that families with young children who live in small flats need to go to the park to avoid going crazy.
I’m talking about those who lived in a house with a garden like me. Those with happy families with no other issues than working from home.
Not many people were responsible, and not many people thought of others. They were thinking about themselves.
Many caught the virus and passed it to family members at risk. Some of those vulnerable family members died. Then everybody was sorry, but by then it was too late.
I would like to know what these same people would have done if they had lived in a country bombarded with missiles rather than a virus. The only thing we were asked to do was to stay at home until they could find us a vaccine. Unlike death, this manoeuvre was temporal.
For me, it is a no-brainer.
The real problem
We’re part of a narcissistic, self-centred, spoiled consumerist society which has decided to live in cloud cuckoo land, to become numb to avoid pain.
We don’t want to understand suffering because we have learnt to remove it from around us.
We live in the culture of letting others deal with our deceased because we can’t bear the discomforts, coldness and stillness of death.
We avoid uncomfortable conversations not to be upset.
We pretend we are going to live forever.
We tell our children to stop being soft and not to cry in front of others.
Overall, we are doomed to fail in front of ourselves.
When we refuse to suffer, we refuse life on life’s terms, imperiling our relationship with the realities around us. Maury Joseph, PsyD,
Wake up and smell the Coffee
Death is part of the pact of being alive.
Death is everywhere and it happens multiple times, every day -wars shouldn’t be part of this list, by the way; they are man-made- and because everything has a beginning and an end, we have to learn to adapt.
We have lost touch with that part of what makes us human and that’s having a very negative impact on our current behaviour towards others.
People have become short-tempered, we can see that in the way some drive, hence the increase in car accidents worldwide.
People want to go out, socialise, but they don’t really know how to look after each other when tough times come around. That’s not creating real connections. That’s not even loving your family and friends.
It’s ok to face the dark side of things, it’s important to feel pain, to be sad. All those feelings make you more balanced because they prepare you for the unavoidable ends.
And when I mean ends, I don’t just mean physical death, I also mean breakups, job losses, illnesses…. changes in general.
As Spanish psychologist Omar Rueda says:
Denial and avoidance are defense mechanisms that we use to face a difficult reality.
He also says:
If you do not connect deeply with your interior, you will go with your deficiencies in your external life, and you will need more of the ideals of the exterior: more parties, more trips, more couples, more friends, a better body, etc.. and you will be more likely to be sad when some of that is missing, because your happiness construct is wrongly constructed. This is based on the projection of false beliefs that we hopelessly project into the external world. This will close you in a glass that you will be able to see but not feel.
Change your approach toward death and find your balance
When you finally realise that by avoiding death you are making it worse for yourself, you will be able to say you have won a war.
As Omar Rueda says, we are never ready for death, but facing it and even making peace with it can help us be more prepared for the most painful losses and even conceiving our own death.
I already addressed this idea in Strategies That Can Help You Overcome Your Fear Of Death.
For some people, the answer is in their religious beliefs, for other people it is finding a purpose, or just the fact that we might be a cosmological accident with no more to it.
What is important in the end is that you make peace with death, even if it scares you.
The moment you do that, you will have changed forever. You will have gained some kind of control, at least over how your approach and piece of mind can make you happier.
Once you start looking at your own existence from this lens, you will become more empathic with others, you will respect their life as much as you respect your own and beautiful things will happen.
You will be happier because you will have made peace with yourself and once you have made peace with yourself you won’t need external pleasures to survive because everything you need will be within you.
Final thoughts
- Connect with yourself by going into the shadow.
- Identify your fear and don’t judge it.
- Ask yourself questions such as: Why am I doing this? How will my actions impact others? How important are my secondary needs in the greatest scheme of things?
- Have a rich internal life by using your critical thinking. Live more in your head. Happiness is not always outside.
- Write down all your anguish and then read it after a few days as if it were written by another person. What advice would you give to that person?
Key Messages:
We all go through different types of death during our lives and all of those prepare us for the big one.
When facing death healthily, without avoidance, we add a new lesson that becomes part of our identity.
When we integrate death into our lives and accept loss and grief as part of our existence, we become an improved version of ourselves.
All you have to do is to embrace it.
Thanks for reading
- I normally write about the Gothic on Medium and in my own online magazine.- I help people learn more about themselves and their fears through literature, films, TV series, music and all those places where our Shadow-Selves lurk.- Have access to thousands stories from me and other writers. Use my referral link and start your journey of self recognition.- Also, use my referral link to no additional cost to you, to make great images like the one I have here, by using Canva.