When a loved one dies, the world freezes up. All the little conflicts that used to constitute a day suddenly seem not to matter anymore. Your reaction could be anything from depression to anger to intense stress. You might miss a lecture, blow up at a friend or forget to eat. Whatever the specifics are, losing someone is never easy. 

As college students, we have reached an age where we are beginning to lose those closest to us. Our parents are middle-aged, and our grandparents are elderly, if they haven’t left us already. I know from personal experience that it is painful to see your grandmother, once able to lift you off your feet and swing you around, barely able to hold a ladle as she serves you urad dal. 

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In helping my grandparents move into their new home closer to us, I was faced with a terrifying thought: In a decade, they could be gone. Suddenly, a reality which I had pushed off for years popped into clear focus. I had never once thought about how I would conduct my life without my Patti and Thatha. 

Dealing with loss is hardly unique to this stage of our lives. Tragic accidents happen all the time, and the older we get, the more likely they are to happen. Considering how you will live your life without your grandparents or other older relatives is not something that anyone wants to do, let alone overworked college students. However, there are more and less destructive ways to grieve, and knowing the difference can save you a lot of heartache. 

To start, I want to dig into a phrase that gets bandied around in a lot of discussions of grief: being at peace with death. It sounds lovely, but upon closer examination, the concept is pretty suspicious. For one thing, no one can ever be “at peace” with death. 

No matter who you are, it’s a human instinct to avoid death and even more human to react to the deaths of others. Images are conjured up of meditative yogis or other Eastern spiritualists who seemingly have the same stoic reaction for every misfortune that comes their way. When counselors to those in grief advise them to “make peace” with the passing, they are asking for something that sounds inhuman. 

At the risk of sounding like my granddad, there’s a story from Buddhist theology that helps in understanding what it actually means to make peace with the loss of a loved one. A novice monk was living in a remote monastery and the master of the place — the oldest and wisest — had recently passed away. His second-in-command, widely respected among the monks as being a worthy successor, began the ritual to cremate and scatter the body of the former master. Before he could do it, however, he broke down in tears.

He began sobbing in front of all his students, until finally, some people had had enough and told him, “This doesn’t look good. It goes against your prestige. People think you have become enlightened, and you are crying! What will they think about you?” .” As always, the master had an answer: “I am not crying for the soul — the soul is eternal — but I am crying for his body. His body was so beautiful, and it will never be again. Can’t I even cry for it? I will never see my Master’s body again!”.” 

The core of that story completely changed the way I understood grieving. Often in grieving, whether it be the loss of a loved one or even the loss of a relationship, we are too often plagued by existential questions. A grandfather passes, and suddenly, millions of intrusive thoughts flood your head. You find yourself asking why this happened to him, why he died in pain, why it couldn’t have happened to someone else, why this whole situation is happening to you. 

Thoughts like these distract us from what we should actually be doing after we experience tragedy: crying. When a grandparent does pass away, take the focus away from yourself and place it onto the one you lost. It is totally normal and mature to be sad, even minorly depressed, but do not burden yourself with deeper questions about the nature of death and morality. Human instincts tell us to cry when we lose a loved one, and there is nothing wrong with fully sitting in that sadness. Allow those feelings to take hold. Remember all the time you spent with the deceased, and let the tears fall. 

To come to terms with death is to know that it will happen, and when it happens, it will hurt. Grieving properly is to allow that pain to wash over you, know that it will pass and, eventually, move on.