"This pain is consuming me," a friend, 48, told me when we talked about his mother's recent death. Gone was his good humor, his frank smile and the willingness to collaborate that distinguished him. The pain had made him lose optimism, and even the passion for his work as a university professor, where I had met him years before. By hugging him I could feel the sadness. He talked a lot about his mother, about how important it had been to have her around in recent months, when he lived with his wife and three children, and he did not think anything could fill the void he had left with his departure. Face death, I said, is one of the greatest challenges of human beings, not only forces us to accept the inevitable, but to face our own fear, which is the most oppressive of all. I remembered what I learned from Paloma Cabadas, a Spanish researcher, author of the book La muerte lucida. Often, he told me, our pain is selfish. To alleviate it, we must reflect, think a little more about the person who left and how we can help her. Show her how much we still love her, when our pain is greater, less help those who have just left to be at peace. I agree with dove that one of the greatest difficulties of the human being is to conceive that we are something more than a body, and that life may continue on a plane that transcends matter and our five senses. But how to overcome pain and recover contact with life? This is what I advised: We will allow the sadness - To overcome the pain we need to cry, make a space for sadness to leave behind. If we contain it, at any time loosen with more force. There is a healthy sadness that relieves us and frees us, that we need to feel in order to restore our interior.
REMEMBER THE NICE. Evoke the pleasant moments we live with the person who died, and their qualities reduce nostalgia and dissipates the pain little by little. The mind is a great ally in those moments, but also a silent enigma, since it can make us keep alive the pain of taking us to acceptance thinking about the good.
RECOGNIZE THE GIFT THAT YOU LEAVE US. When a loved one leaves we leave a great gift to help us live better, for example, we will discover new ways to use freedom, to be more self-sufficient and to reassess life and people.
CONNECT US WITH DREAMS. Paloma says that when we dream of the person who died, we establish an ethereal contact with her, but not an illusion. If we dream of transmitting a sense of harmony, we believe that it is at peace where it is. Otherwise, we can help her achieve peace by visualizing her as if she were in front of us and talking to her with a clear mind and an open heart. So we can close any pending with her or tell her what we could not do when she was alive.
THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE. It always leads us to ask questions about the beyond, the transcendence of life and the idea of eternity. therefore, the period of grief gives us the opportunity to reflect on a topic that, at least in the West, education usually does not deal with. In this way, when meditating on death, our fear dissipates and we can give our life a deeper meaning. As Paloma says, "losing the fear of death is also losing the fear of living.