The opposite of life it is not- what is the meaning of death?

Death and taxes are the only thing that is certain in this world, so goes the conventional wisdom. Tax, i do not want to talk about as i already deal with it in my job. Death is the topic i want to touch on, specifically the death of my father.

There is so little that is known of death. Haven't given much thought to it either until my father's illness forced me to look at it from a new perspective. While it has been said that the meaning of life is whatever we make of it, the meaning of death, if it has any meaning at all, is much more elusive. Yet our lives here are really short and we spent most of our time doing things which does not matter when we leave this place.

Am i writing this to feel better, to somehow assuage the guilt of possibly lying to myself, by telling myself that i'd done my best to get to know him while he's still here, and that i'd been a filial son by visiting him in his sick bed as often as i could after work, while in reality i could have done much better? Yes i must admit to that. Am i writing to feel better, by convincing myself that i'd done everything to make his final days as comfortable as possible to him, while in reality it was my mother who's the one that did all the hard work of making him feel more comfortable? Yes i must admit to that too. My mum is the one who suffered the most, both physically and emotionally, as a consequence.

i used to hate my father when i was young. To me, he was the kind of person who only cares for himself and does not care for his family. We rarely talk then. But later in life, there came a realization that my father, as a child who lost both his parents, and was raised by his 'extended' family who does not show him love during his growing up years, may not himself understand how to show his love for his family too.

After that realization, i did reconciled with him quite late in my life. i did spent time with him years before he falls into sickness which he never recovered.

In hindsight, the time spent with him should have been used more wisely to get to know each other. Instead we talked mostly about frivolous things. Mostly we don't talk at all. Now after his death, i have very little memories of any meaningful conversation with him that i could hold dear. Now i realized that we spent so little time together all these years. So little is known about a man that has been with me for so long, the longest relationship i'd had with another man. Isn't it ironic that we want to repair a broken relationship with a loved one when that person has left our life?

In haste, i wrote an email to Juliana of my feelings about my father's death.

The only regret i have is that i was not beside him to comfort him when he passed away. He was alone in that hospital bed when i should not have went back home for a short rest.

i know he can't speak to me in his ill health but i just wish he would say that he is going to be fine where he is going. Or maybe it's just me that wanted him to be at peace and not have to suffered so much. It's hard to have this conflicting feeling where i wanted him to go so that he would not have to suffer so much and yet at the same time i would not want him to leave because there is so much things that i still have not said to him. i even failed to keep a promise to myself to take him on a holiday overseas. All that is past now. That is some of the things i know i have to learn to let go in time. Mostly, just needed to find the strength to face this.

All that is left of his time here in this world is just these memories i have of him and nothing more. At times i would think, if those memories were forgotten would he still have existed, and took comfort that he would have existed as long as i existed.

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And wrote this short eulogy, as a sort of remembrance of him.

Every now and then, my memory keeps going back to the final moments before i learned of my father's death. i have to accept the reality that the loss can't be changed by comforting myself in the knowledge that if life is eternal, there is perhaps a meaning to his passing.

The mathematician Kurt Godel believed that since our lives in this world is characterized mostly by confusion and ignorance, our existence in this world is merely a preparation for something more meaningful, perhaps in our next life.

Whether there is truth in that belief, the answer lies with him to find and is not for me to know. i believed that there is also a meaning, for those who has to go on with life, to find for themselves when a loved one has moved on. The meaning may differ for each of us but if we search deep within ourselves, we will find it. If not now perhaps someday.

In this age of confusion, where much of the world still measure the value of a person's life by how much material possession he has or how high his/her social standing is, my father is a "nobody".

He doesn't have much money or material possession. In his old age, he doesn't have many friends. Only one friend came to his funeral. He did not leave any of his material possession for me to keep as a memento, or even a single word of advice or encouragement to keep as a lasting memory. He came to this world with nothing and he left with nothing, for his family nor the world. It is as if he did not came to this world at all. But he did came here, and he is real. To me and my family at least. And he will lived on as long as i lived on.

If eternity is a moment untouched by the hands of time, and fate has brought us together for this brief moment in our lives, i will forever remember and cherish our time together in this world.

May he be at peace with himself.

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Writing down these feelings helped me see things more clearly about my life, and hopefully would help clear up certain issues i still have with surviving members of my family. Issues which i think is important to resolve. Maybe they are part of the reason why we came here- to learn. It's a crazy thought but if Godel is right and reincarnation is true, if these so-called life issues are not resolved before we die, they could well "carry forward" to our next life in this world again or we would never graduate to our next life in another, perhaps, better world? There's no closure to issues we have not learn to resolve or learn to let go.

But maybe the most important lesson i learned from the death of someone close is to be grateful and to appreciate the times we spent with them while they're alive.

For those of us who had experienced the painful loss of loved ones and still have to go on with life, it is always about words left unsaid or deeds left undone for the ones we loved. Or, if we have said or done things which hurt them, perhaps the only regret is about not telling them how sorry we are about hurting them. These things, which seemed unimportant previously, would become important when we looked back on them.

There's an old chinese saying which goes something like this, "destiny is arranged by the heavens, while fate is what humans make of our destiny". The meaning of the proverb is simple. We may not be able to choose who we will meet in our lives as we cannot foresee our destinies. All we can do is choose how we treat the people that we meet and spent our lives with, specifically our parents, spouse, children and friends. Meeting another soul and being in a relationship with them is a most sacred and mysterious arrangement that the heavens arranged for each of us.

There's another chinese proverb, translated as "we come together in this lifetime but not in the next life", which means we can be with someone only in this lifetime but will not be with that same person again in the next life. So, we should always appreciate and cherish our loved ones and every moment spent with them, for when they're gone we may not see them ever again.

The world will go on just fine without my father. Many years from now, the tears would have dried up and this world would have no memories he had even existed. Even if one were to tell another "existence" is not the same as "being", would it make the listener feel better?

i must apologise if what i'd written sounds like an outpouring of grief and obtuse philosophical musings rather than adding to the vast amount of knowledge on this forum; hopefully it's not more noise than music. :)

Also, a most heart-felt gratitude to Juliana for her kind words and her encouragement to share my experience here, without which would not consider sharing this sort of directionless ramblings. i do not know how sharing this would help others here but her kind words of encouragement did helped me feel better.

i take leave of the esteemed members here with a poem dedicated to my father.

Once,
A young man who does not care
What is going on in the rest of the world
His world is safe and warm
The only world he cares about
Or so he thought

One day,
A realization came upon him
What goes on in the rest of the world
Affects his world too
We all lived in the same world
Sharing in the same dream

Now,
The young man has gone from him
And so he longed for the old days
To leave behind the world he has known
And return to His world
To dream of a new beginning
Where it feels safe and warm again

The wise says
Life is but a dream
The dreamer can't tell
What is real?
What is not?

In the end
We all falter
But does it matter.

Thanks for sharing lightinthedista​nce, your words were well articulated. It seems like it was cathartic for you to share this. Take care.

Thank you for your kind words, 3D Student. It was, in a way, a hard experience every time i looked back at it. i was so calm at his passing but deep down i was in turmoil. Had to put on a collected facade as my mom was emotionally distraught at his death. It was only later that sadness overcame me when i am alone with him in my thoughts.

i did not do much for him when he was alive so there is this feeling of regret. The feeling would pass eventually but the regret i had to learn to live with and hopefully be able to forgive later in life.

Hi lightinthedista​nce! I am sorry hear you are passing through hard and sad moments. My father pass away almost 3 year ago and though my life story and relation with him was different I can understand the sadness of feel his absence. Time after he pass away I also, like you, felt that maybe I could have do this or that, or to say something on a specific moment or situation... At the end I undertood that one do what one can do, and it is valid for most of us. Your father, like you, surely did what you could do on that precise moment.

I think that it is good allow us to feel the sadness and grief of the loss of loved one, but also I think it is better yet if we take advantage of this kind of hard experience and we learn whatever will be the lesson that we should learn through it.

I'd want to add that you are not alone, we are with you and you can count with us everytime you need support or just need to talk.

Thank you for sharing lightinthedistance,
What you shared is a reminder, that people can at one point just move on...
We usually don't think this will ever happen,

It made me think about the things i am doing now, how i can do things better, what can we do to stay in the present moment, and do our best, and that i know at some point we will come to this predicament in our lives. With others and with ourselves too. i believe we come here and need to learn something.

I am sorry to hear about your loss, and thank you for sharing this experience and your comments with us, lightinthedistance.

Hi, I really liked what you've write, I enjoyed reading it, thanks for sharing, it reminds me pretty much of my grandfather and his relationship with his son and daughters, specially with his son.

My grandfather came from an arab family, his father was very strict with his children and abusive with his wife, all this helped me to understand later why he, my grandfather, acted in certain ways. He wasn't a lovelly father to his children, he only took care of working and having food on the table, he acted with his family almost the same as his father did with them. My grandfather worked since he was 12 to then give his salary to his father, he tried to do this with his son but he refused and it wasn't easy to pass over his wife, she wouldn't have minded being beaten for protecting her son, my grandmother ended up overprotecting him and consenting him too much, his son started taking bad decisions and this completely ruined his relationship with his father. Many years later when things calmed down my grandfather was diagnosed with Cancer, my grandmother was dead, so his daughters had to take care of him. This was something difficult to do since he was always fighting with his daughters and trying to separate them, something that he achieved. He died a year and a half later after being diagnosed, as a consequence of his bad decisions his son was deprived of his liberty, (i.e. he was in jail). He had a special permit to visit him 1 hour every 15 days at the hospital, since my grandfather couldn't be in his house because of the disease, therefore he was there. It didn't last long, my grandfather died a few months later, but at least they could tell each other all the things they had kept hidden for years. His daughters didn't visit him often since after all the pain he was facing they thought he was going to change but he didn't, he spend his last months talking about money, talking bad about his daughters, his son and complaining about his dead wife and the things that she did wrong (he always thought he was perfect because he worked his entire life) When he died the only people who went to the funeral were family of his daughters because of respect to them. About his grandchildren... and this includes me, he was always kind with me and also with my cousin, but not with my other cousin, he saw on him his son, so he always despised him and treated him horrible.
When he died I felt sorry for him, because he only lived to work, instead of enjoying his family he only complained about them. As I said before, when he was diagnosed we all thought he was going to change and try to enjoy his last moments, but he didn't, we were so stupid, we were expecting that a person who was stubborn by nature to change suddendly, some people do this but knowing him I can tell you that we were wishful thinking.

Regarding to your question,I sincerly don't know what is the sence of death, but I think one of the main aims of death (if not the only one, since I don't see any other objective) it's to end up a period, this period is life in a 3D body, if all of this is correct, after death we will reincarnate in another body and this couldn't happen if we don't die phisically.

You're not alone, many people experience the same as you, it is normal to feel guilt or to feel that we haven't said everything to that person once it is gone or that you haven't act in the proper way, but try to understand yourself and don't be hard with yourself, since we act thinking that what we are doing is fine and maybe with time we figure out that we were wrong.

lightinthedistance said:

Am i writing this to feel better, to somehow assuage the guilt of possibly lying to myself, by telling myself that i'd done my best to get to know him while he's still here, and that i'd been a filial son by visiting him in his sick bed as often as i could after work, while in reality i could have done much better? Yes i must admit to that. Am i writing to feel better, by convincing myself that i'd done everything to make his final days as comfortable as possible to him, while in reality it was my mother who's the one that did all the hard work of making him feel more comfortable? Yes i must admit to that too. My mum is the one who suffered the most, both physically and emotionally, as a consequence.

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These are hard questions to ask yourself and even harder when the answers are unpleasant. But you are facing well it seems, and have gained a bit of self-knowledge to carry you forward. I feel your father would be pleased. Gurdjieff said one of our duties is to 'repair the past", that is our family past. Maybe you are asking and answering the questions he may never have of himself.

I also missed my father's passing, though I had sat with him all the night before. I left his room for a few minutes to use the washroom early in the morning. When I returned, he was gone. The lovely nurse who had been on night shift said this was a common thing. The dying will wait for a moment alone, then leave. So try not to feel badly about not being there. You did your best as you understood it at the time.

Thanks to all who are writing. It is such s DEEP and rich subject. One thing I would like to say: You can always still get in touch with your father because he is "in" you to some large degree. The older I get the more I hear and feel my father in my own words, thoughts and feelings - in my very being as well as my automaticity. Genetics are a funny thing that way. And given the idea that we choose souls for parents that are somehow collinear with our needed life lessons, well - it might be possible to say a man is more similar to his father than he would like to admit. Even if in seemingly opposite ways.

The whole of nature from birth to death is a cyclic process that plays out over and over, I think. As I reflect on my relationship with my father, it is good to see my relationship with my children all held together in some larger context. If I have a complaint about an aspect of relationship between one of my sons and myself - I can ask: how was I just the same with my father? It is humbling. It is a part of 'paying all' I think.

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I also missed my father's passing, though I had sat with him all the night before. I left his room for a few minutes to use the washroom early in the morning. When I returned, he was gone. The lovely nurse who had been on night shift said this was a common thing. The dying will wait for a moment alone, then leave.
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Yes, this happens often enough. I had read about this in the works of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Maybe the departing ones finds it hard to leave when loved ones with whom they share a strong emotional bond are right next to them wanting them to stay.

Just sharing my personal experience here for another perspective. When my mother's cancer came back after remission, it was metastasized. She knew and I knew the end was near. We were on opposite sides of the globe. I went and spent 3 months with her. She had pain during that time but was moving around, doing most of the stuff that she was doing earlier. We had a lot of chats regarding the question that lightinthedistance asked in the title of the thread. Her fear of death was allayed to a degree due to these conversations and she had communicated this to relatives who visited her towards the end. Still, it may have been harder for her to leave when I was around. This could be taken in two ways. I stick around so that she is also around longer. But then, it would have only prolonged the suffering of the body. When I left after 3 months both of us knew that most likely this was the last time we would see each other upright face to face, or even at all. She passed a few weeks later. I was not there when she passed. I did not have any regrets. I grieved without guilt or anger despite guilt-inducing thoughts/statements like "she could not see he only son in her last days".

My point in sharing this story is that grieving does not necessarily have to be tied with guilt. Like lightinthedistance expressed, using death as reminding factor for how to spend the time we have for others and ourselves is one of the more important lessons from the experience.

Thanks for sharing your experience lightinthedistance, and my condolences to you and your family for your loss. Here is a thread discussing aspects of the death phenomenon
On Death

Thanks for the consoling words, msante and Felipe4.

BrenXHkm, thanks for sharing your story about your grandfather.

BrenXHkm said:

Regarding to your question,I sincerly don't know what is the sence of death, but I think one of the main aims of death (if not the only one, since I don't see any other objective) it's to end up a period, this period is life in a 3D body, if all of this is correct, after death we will reincarnate in another body and this couldn't happen if we don't die phisically.

You're not alone, many people experience the same as you, it is normal to feel guilt or to feel that we haven't said everything to that person once it is gone or that you haven't act in the proper way, but try to understand yourself and don't be hard with yourself, since we act thinking that what we are doing is fine and maybe with time we figure out that we were wrong.

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i am fairly certain (from knowledge gathered in this forum to scientific studies published on the internet, and listening to elders talking about it), that a strong case can be made for reincarnation. It further builds a strong case that life goes on after death, that life has no opposite, and that the dualistic thinking of life and death which most people take for the truth is a wrong concept all along.

It is not the death of my father that saddens me as much as it is the things we did not do or words that was not said when we were together. Regret is lesson not learned i guess.

If he were still alive, i would have taken him on a trip to a certain country as it has been one of his wish to travel there. i would take back all the unkind words that i had said to him during my younger days. i should not have hesitated to apologize to him before he is gone. But all the "should" and "would" cannot change what is past.

Now, i can only keep alive memories of the time spent with him and living those same things mentioned earlier with the remaining members of my family while i'm still alive. Perhaps that is one way of keeping his spirit alive in me.

Not to judge another person but from your writings, it seemed your grandfather may have been stubborn but he lived a decent and honourable life bringing up his children. Perhaps, his children did not try to understand things from his perspective as you said he started working at 12 to provide for his family then. He was still a child where he should be enjoying his childhood instead of taking on an adult's responsibilities. The experience can turn a person hard inside. My father shared quite a similar experience as he worked at a very young age too and did not attend school much.

herondancer said:

Gurdjieff said one of our duties is to 'repair the past", that is our family past.

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herondancer, i am sorry for your loss. And thanks for sharing that quote. What Gurdjieff said was certainly very true, i believe.

BHelmet, the idea that we choose souls as our parents is something that resonates with elders in my culture. In where i lived, this idea is lost among the younger generation now.

obyvatel, thanks for sharing your experience too. The link you shared is very enlightening. i learned a lot going through it. Yes, the funeral rites described in it resonates with the ones i performed for my father. i have the understanding that it is all just a rite but have to performed it all the same as a sign of respect not only for the deceased but also out of filial duties for family members who may not share my views.