Throughout our civilisation, the human population has been through a multitude of painful and horrific times that have seen various cultures and traditions lost. Amongst the pleasure, celebrations, social life, e-commerce and menial traffic, the part that sticks with most humans is the emotions around grief and the aggressive response that happens after the acknowledgement of a tragedy.
I wanted to write a blog today that honours the woes that others have suffered. On a subjective level, whether the person feeling the pain has done something to provoke it or they are suffering at the hands of someone else, through loss of life or through someone leaving, grief is something we all suffer at some point in our lives.
In other areas around the world death is respected as part of life and the subject of such is spoken about freely in a similar way. In India for example, people will often see dead bodies on the streets before they go through the ritual of sending the body down the Ganges and lit in flames. This makes the experience of death a very different one than that of the Western world. The individual pain that is suffered whilst mourning the loss of someone close is much the same however and the variance to me seems that it is more to do with the abandonment that we experience during this time rather than the Eastern belief that death is an intrinsic part of life.
Having recently lost someone dear to me in this part of the world, the West, I have realised that some people will allow you to talk about how you are feeling and offer sympathy in return, some are able to hear it but pass it off quickly without the sympathy but most find it difficult to talk around the topic in case they get brought down in the emotional torrent of conversation. It is essential to talk during anytime of emotional chaos and this is something the western needs to spend more time doing. The daily stresses of life can get too much and if we jointly share the woes that each of us are facing without making them matters of our own discomfort, the matter itself will become less of a victimised scenario and more of a regularity throughout our daily patterns.
Death is always felt, and it is felt at varying levels. If we learn to understand the mutual respect that is required during the times of death related greif then life itself wont feel like it is separated from death and the stretch to mitigate the response of others when distressing conversations are bought up will be justified in the resulting social movement and paradigm that arises. Abandonment, the common feeling related to death is quite a tricky one and it wouldn’t be as much of a sticky subject if we all came together, taking time away from your life to listen to someone who is grieving and feeling the effects of abandonment may very well leave them more contented by the very nature of others being there in that moment. You always hear the age old saying ‘never leave a man down’ ironically to do with war and the other one ‘I don’t know where I would be without my friends’. If more of us had more friends to speak to during hard time the world would be a better place.
Please contact me on FB or via Acorn to talk around subjects that cause you distress, pain or if you are grieving.
