Funeral reflections

The deaths, mainly from people who make up our loved environment (friends, family, co-workers, etc.), they put us in front of us, facing the pain of loss and anguish as a great “healing emotion” of the wound it leaves us.

But, at the same time, in the spaces where people who have died are held vigil the most varied reflections about life are elucidated. I call them funeral reflections.

Death

We were not born prepared for life, so we are much less prepared for death. There are different conceptions about it, from positions that understand life as a transition towards death and, in reality, we live when we die to those more materialistic that understand that life is this and when we die everything is over.

Man is the only living being that is aware of death and, therefore, is afraid of its appearance.. However, the human being is born without awareness of his future death, which prospers as he grows: gradual biological decline and degradation seems to accompany the cognitive process of realizing that life is finite: being born, growing, developing, reproducing , decline and die.

Experiencing sensations of death is a totally subjective fact. There are people who experience losses in a tragic way and there are those who maintain an almost stoic disposition.

These reactions depend not only on the attribution given to the death and the person who died, but also on the degree of emotional expressiveness that the person possesses. There are people who defend themselves or block themselves from expressing how they feel, while there are others who are freer to allow themselves to cry and express anguish in a more stark way.

Finitude and transcendence are concepts that go together. Transcending implies lasting after death, that is, leaving a mark that is manifested in subsequent generations. Not only material values ​​but also philosophical, emotional, experience and learning values ​​are transmitted and grant a certain sense of immortality to the deceased person.

Nevertheless, Transcendence has a certain intensity that can decline as time passes. And that is true death, since for a time and according to the legacy left by the deceased person, they survive in memories. Then she will slowly die in people’s memories, in the memories of family and friends, until gradually she will disappear completely.

Accept the loss

Loss is followed by a period of mourning and grief, a grieving process which can last months or in pathological cases never end. In this sense, there are no time patterns, since grief will depend on a multiplicity of factors, from the possibility of expressing emotions, having managed to say goodbye to the person, closing the bond and acceptance of death or the level of denial about it. the same, among others.

There is a directly proportional relationship between these factors and the time of grieving: the greater the expressiveness, acceptance and farewell, the faster the survivor will recover and leave the grieving situation. The greater the denial, resistance to saying goodbye and expressing emotions, the longer the period of mourning will be..

Accepting the loss implies that in the prelude to death, explicitly or implicitly, a full farewell is achieved. in which everything that the dying person leaves in life can be manifested. This emptying involves letting go of the person. It involves not only liberating it, but also liberating itself from the selfishness of emotional possession. This detachment suggests entering a new door in the relationship.

Much of this acceptance has to do with the type of death. There are deaths that are surprising and deaths that are the product of a long process of deterioration.

In this type of unforeseen deaths, family members, mainly, cannot understand what happened. They ask themselves why again and again and try to provide an answer to a situation that has no explanation and even if it had one, it would not be enough to mitigate the pain. People do not accept and are not aware of what happened: “but… he was fine”, “he had a health that was like an oak”, “Why us?”…

Opposite situations and sensations are glimpsed in those deaths that are the result of a long process. of illness.

Terminal or neurological diseases, among others, make the person go through successive hospitalizations, trips to and from clinics, visits to doctors and endless treatments that feed the life expectancy of the patient and their family. The sick person His emotional environment is gradually consumed and in the same way, which, on the one hand, wishes for the ordeal of the protagonist and his own to end through death that grants peace to everyone.

Whatever death may be, the truth is that The loss of a loved one is one of the most stressful events in life.

Reflections on funeral times

Funeral times have been significantly reduced since they are no longer the 12-hour marathons with a pilgrimage of people saying goodbye and greeting the bereaved, between coffee and philosophical conversations about life: “We are nothing”, “I spoke with him yesterday”, “incredible!”, “Osvaldito was a boss”, “but he was so sporty”, “always so measured in the meals he served him”, “poor Aída , he was always stressed by every stupid thing”, “we have to change”, “you can’t live like this…”.

Express death without a wake and with cremation has canceled one of the most reflective moments that we as human beings have, since, paradoxically, When we talk most about life it is in situations of death, like at a funeral.

There we become aware of the importance of life and how much we should value it. It is as if we were making a momentary semicolon and sharing the things that we put aside or put off and to which we should give prominence.

At a funeral, we talk about the importance of affection, family, friends, the warm hug, of the people who love us and who are unconditionally by our side and to whom, on a daily basis, we do not give the place they deserve.

We say that we have to calm down and live more calmly because, sometimes, we create problems through stupidity (of course, next to death, all things acquire the status of stupidity). That we should have a life in which we enjoy more and work less, that we can laugh and not impose a stereotyped bad mood on our faces.

We also say that we have to stop smoking (especially when the person died of cancer), we dent the Marlboro package and we make a firm promise to give up the habit. We look at our prominent abdomen and swear that we are going to walk 40 minutes a day and that we will also eat a healthy diet.

Unfortunately, These thoughts last as long as a breath. When we leave the wake or the funeral ends, we get in the car, we speed more than normal because we are in a hurry to get to work, and at the first intersection the bus driver, a big, arrogant man, cuts us off in his vehicle and makes us stop. let’s insult wildly.

Almost on the verge of attack we continue our journey seeing the driver’s physical build, because we have a loss of sanity and we don’t want to go to intensive care at the nearest hospital…

Anxiety causes us to immediately rescue a cigarette stored in the glove compartment and smoke it in desperation like a prisoner in a prison. Then altered, When we get to work, we get into a fight with someone from the office. and in the midst of anxiety and tension, at noon we eat a Milanese with fries: a frying dish with low-quality cholesterol oil!

Funeral reflections. I always recommend to patients that these reflections persist and fundamentally that It is not necessary for someone to die to change the way we look at the world and our life in it. Expressing the reflection is not the problem…. The problem is carrying it out.

You might be interested…