Paul: I have recently lost my mom after a long and protracted illness. Her death seemed so unnecessary, painful, and unfair. I am struggling to understand its meaning, or how to relate to death from a Vedantic point of view. Any help or advice is welcome. What should my sadhana be in dealing with this overwhelming grief?
Sundari: Funny, this is the second time this week this question has come up. As Vedantins, we grieve not for the living or the dead because we know there is neither. We are the eternal Self, unborn and undying. Who is it that lives and dies? Only the body dies. And though our departed loved one was never not the Self, blessed is the soul whose painful karma ends in this life, hopefully to return in a Subtle body that actualizes the true freedom of Self-Realization. Truth with a capital T is a rock that withstands everything mithya throws at it, even the deepest grief. Our sadhana in grief is to contemplate loss in the light of Self-knowledge, which says there is no loss, ever. Loss only applies to mithya, the person.
Your love for the departed is not lost because love is the nature of the Self, of you. You loved them for the sake of the Self, for you, not for their own sake. Though it seems like you do and did love them deeply, we never love any object other than for the sake of the Self because there is no other option in a nondual universe. You and your departed loved one are eternal, unborn, and undying. Take refuge in that thought. Suffering over their human suffering serves no purpose whatsoever, not for the departed nor for you; you are only punishing yourself. The love is real, the suffering is not because it is caused by the belief that you and the departed are separate and have been separated by death.
There is no problem in death, it is the end of suffering for the dead and release into the unbounded. We project an association onto the people we love, a ‘myness’, such as mother, lover, child, etc. These are ideas we carry forward from our karmic connections in ‘past’ lives. The vasanas that you called ‘mom’ will be reactivated before long and another ‘mom’ will appear in Consciousness. When someone we love dies, we are just the Self witnessing the Self abandoning a particular form. It has no ultimate meaning. It is just life. Death is life. There is a saying about death that resonates for me and that is ‘do not grieve for the dead because perhaps, they grieve for you, the living.’ Sobering thought.
That said, grieving a loved one is a natural and human thing to do; it cannot be avoided, even when you know you are the Self. How poignant, deep, and beautiful is the jiva’s pain as it stares into the unfathomable depths of life, loss, and death. Let it be, and observe the grief, which is a kind of praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses, even though love is not lost. We grieve the touch, warmth, and presence of those we love and lose. What a traitorous felon human love can be, granting us gifts beyond measure and then taking them away. Hence the teaching on non-dependence of objects for our happiness: because we are not in control of them, and loss is an inevitable part of life.
This is not a directive not to love, quite the opposite. You cannot secure your life by never risking it. To live fully as a human is to love as much and as deeply as we can, even though we know loss is part of it. But it is to place our love where it is safe, in the knowledge of our undying Self. Blessed are we that are not consumed by the pain of loss, and remain, despite it all, the untouched witness. Self-knowledge is our only armor. It makes it clear that grieving is not about the departed, it’s about you.
From the human perspective, beyond the five stages of grieving, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, there is a sixth. It is the possibility of discovering something meaningful in grief, though not in death itself. There is nothing meaningful to be found in death; it’s just the end of the body. Death of a loved one gives us a great opportunity to understand what love is and why it is what always remains when the loved object is taken from us.
My advice for your sadhana is to create an altar for devotional practice (if you don’t have one) where you offer all your feelings in the karma yoga spirit to the Field, to Isvara, the Self, you. Place a picture of your lost love on it as a symbol of the eternal and undying love you are, and your loved one was and still is.
Much love, Sundari
