Grief and the Soul

With various bereavements occurring around me at the moment death has been on the brain. As I have been pondering God’s existence with death and grief surrounding me there has been something on my mind: the soul’s relation to grief and the physical response to loss.

Why do many peoples’ brains give such a negative and often uninhibited and uncontrolled emotional and physical response to intense moments of grief? It seems to me that it is a very unhelpful process, something that hinders rather than assists. Now I am not denying that people should be allowed to grieve, that would be a ridiculous idea and something that would be unsustainable but what I am wondering is what the point of grief is?

I’m sure there’s probably a neurological reason that I’m missing due to my non-scientific background but it seems to me that grief points to the existence of the soul. We realise that someone’s very existence has been snuffed out, that in that brief instant, with that last breath their consciousness no longer exists. Even as a Christian the thought does go through your head, ‘What if they are literally no more? What if there is no God? What if they don’t have a soul and their essence, the person that I knew, has gone forever. They aren’t anywhere, they literally no longer exist (at least on an A-theory of time…).

However I trust that they do still exist somewhere, not that the soul is necessarily eternal (Plato, not scripture) but I trust that disembodied mind is of course possible. 

So grief, while being destructive and a hindrance to development shows us that we care about what happens to other peoples’ souls, it shows us that we miss people around us and it shows us that we value their impact on society and on our lives. Of course this could be explained through desiring their skills for the herd and not missing them, but missing what they do. This doesn’t make sense to me, it seems more likely that we do, indeed, miss their whole being, we don’t like the fact that their consciousness may no longer exist in any way. Why? Perhaps we fear for their soul. No, I don’t think so… Maybe we are selfish. We want to keep them so we can feel good about their existence again.

Grief is okay, but it should always be seen as a celebration of life and not a mourning of the lack of existence for that individual who once was. To be caught in grief is to be caught in misery, it is to self-destruct and it is to forget the reality of death.

Death should not be feared, it should be embraced.

Glen