Question: How to deal with the death of a loved one?

Question: How to deal with the death of a loved one: your loved companion, your dearest grandmother, your cat — the best cat ever? How to deal with loneliness, emptiness, absence, lack of contact, no exchange, just silence? I’m afraid of that.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: This is a topic that we’ll be covering later on in the week, but the first thing to realize is that death is not the end of your contact with that being. Because of your kamma in common, you will most likely meet each other again unless either of you attains nibbāna first. So it’s not totally the end.

Second, the worst part of the silence is the sense of being powerless to help the other person, but as the Buddha explains, you can make merit and dedicate it to the person who’s passed away. You can do this with animals, too.

From the Buddha’s point of analysis, when you leave someone or someone has left you like this, it’s almost as if a part of your identity — your sense of “what I am” — has been ripped out, so it’s going to take a while for that wound to heal. So whatever expression you want to give to your grief, go ahead and express it until you realize that it’s becoming self-indulgent. Then bring to mind the fact that this happens to everybody. Look around: Everybody’s lost somebody. When you reflect on this, it can turn your grief into compassion for all the suffering that goes on in saṁsāra, which is a much more skillful emotion than grief. We’ll talk more about this later in the week.

~ "Facing Aging, Illness, & Death: The Central Teaching of the Buddha"


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