Have you ever thought about why we grieve when someone dies? We assume it is because of the pain we feel knowing we will never see that person again, but have you ever thought about it deeper?

Animals do not seem to grieve like we do. Even when a mother animal loses her little one, perhaps she does experience a certain sadness, we cannot say for sure, but she does not seem to dwell on it for days, months, or years like we humans do. The truth is, human grief is just another illusion that we create in our mind. We are taught that we are supposed to grieve upon someone’s death, so that is what we do. It is not the death itself that causes this grief. Allow me to prove this.

When Does Grieving Start?

Let’s say you had a childhood best friend. You haven’t kept in touch lately, because you both got busy with your lives. You just learned from a mutual friend that s/he died last month and are devastated. But wait a minute. When did your grieving begin? You did not start grieving upon that person’s death, but a month later, when you got the news.

This means it was not the death but the learning of it that triggered the grieving. What if you had not learned about it for another year? What if you never learned about it? Maybe you would have thought you lost touch or wondered what happened to that person, but you would have not grieved.

If the friend’s death had caused the grieving, you would have felt it the moment s/he died. If that were the case, you would have had no control over it. The decision to grieve was a choice that you made upon hearing the news. This is not to say that we imagine the pain; it is to point out that our mind created that pain. It was not a conscious choice, nor a preferred choice, but a choice nonetheless. Because grieving is a choice, it means that we do not have to if we choose not to.

Letting It Pass

There is a story of an old zen master whose wife died. One of his students noticed that he did not seem to be affected by it, so he asked the master, “Sorry if this sounds rude, but you just lost your wife and do not seem to be grieving. Do zen masters not feel any sadness?” The master replied, “Of course we do. The difference is that, we perceive it much like we perceive a cloud passing by in the sky. Sadness comes and goes. A person comes into your life, and a person exits your life. We feel sadness like anyone else, the difference is, we do not dwell on it. We let it go when it is over.”

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