In the dark ages, they didn’t care when people died as much.
People were dying all over. The majority of people you knew were acquainted with a personal death. Mortality rates were higher in almost all respects. Getting cancer because you’ve lived too long is a privilege. Remember that.
So, what did society do?
They had mourning rituals. They had symbols to let people around you know you were mourning. They had significantly lowered social expectations because people were in mourning. They had much less self-pity and simultaneously more practical compassion.
They knew how to do death.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but our society has gone through and is going through a major arc of death.
(News to no one, but I hate breaking bad news)
It would be normal, from most historical contexts, to don your mourning cloak, slow down, let your tears fall, and alchemize meaning in whatever way you can. Maybe not productively. Expecting yourself not to change after this much societal death is what would be crazy. Don’t let the media or your own expectations gaslight you out of knowing that it’s right to mourn and to change. Like a blacksmith pounding out his blade of meaning on the anvil of new hope, take your new, sharp discernment of what matters out of this.
Cast off your cloak when you’re ready, no earlier. Let things that needed to die, die.
Momento mori the hell out of it.
You survive, not what they tell you.
You survive, not what you should do.
You survive, not that no one else matters, because they do. Hold them to you with fiery passion, with measured patience, with an edge that says “I see you and I hold you, and I burn all the rest.” Look into them like a lover who’s dark, like the villain they need in the story of a tragedy where revenge, via whatever cascade effect of fate, comes to pass, “but we don’t care, we’re what matters. We outlasted.”
But then, even as it rips out your soul to do so, lay it down. Let that version of you die. By your choice.
Let it fade, by your right.
Let it go, by your faith.
Get back to doing meaningful things.
Steal that last breath from them. The breath of knowing they’ve made you like them.
You’ve always been like them.
The natural man cannot discern the things of God. You were born natural.
They knew that, in olden times. The body is riddled with weakness and flaw. With vice.
But you choose to be different.
You choose to let those things die.
Out of and inside yourself.
This is a good death.
