All beings return to it

At work yesterday, we learned that the mother of one of our collegues' partners, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She has a matter of weeks, possibly months, to live.

Sometimes, Death can creep up upon us all unexpected; at other times, death is expected, accepted, perhaps sometimes even longed for. With our modern, western culture, we often worship life and youth; look at how people spend time and, often, vast amounts of money, trying to stave off the inevitable - encroaching old age and the inevitability of death.

When someone we know dies young or much earlier than we have come to expect, this death becomes a tragedy. Our grief can be overwhelming; it can take over our lives; we can appear to have come to terms with it only to have it blindside us at unexpected moments. Christianity would have us believe that, if we lead good lives prior to death, we will be 'allowed' into Heaven by our Heavenly Father. Personally, I prefer Ch.34 of the TTC:

"Enduring without desire,
It may be called slight.
All beings return to it,
But it does not become their Master."

From this perspective, dying merely means that we slough off our mortal, human, bodies and reunite our spirit/soul/chi with Tao. This is not the same as the Christian belief in Heaven; there is no 'allowing' here, nor any specific requirement to live a 'good' life according to very clearly defined rules (and how do we know what good is?). Our death, from this perspective, inevitably leads us to reunification.

And yet this is not an easy perspective to hold on to, but we should remember that our grief is not for those who have left us, they are beyond pain and fear. Our grief is for ourselves, the ones left behind. Our grief expresses the fact that there is, and always will be, a certain person-shaped gap in our lives that used to contain someone we cared for.

We should resist the temptation to let grief overwhelm us at all times. Obviously, there will be times when our grief seems to become unbearable, and this is when we need to share that grief either with friends or trained counsellors, but we should always strive to bring it into perspective and remind ourselves that life progresses smoothly on and we must move with it or be left behind.

Tag Taoism grief death