Good Mourning

 Whenever a person feels a strong emotions toward something and someone, there is usually something psychic that needs to be worked on until it can be fully seen for what it is. Once that feeling is known for what it is, one can also see the other for who they are as well, and those strong feelings can then become deeper and more nuanced. This isn't to say that the feelings suddenly go away; they just transform into something more interesting and balanced.
  During the last session of the Buddhist sutra studies class tonight, we talked about the Buddhist notions of not wanting to 'show mourning' toward those who are about to pass into the next life, for fear that the mourning feelings will cause the consciousness to want to stay on earth to comfort the mourner. The goal in a lot of Buddhist systems  and philosophies is not to attach to worldly things, so it's considered a kind of obstacle if one shows mourning toward the person who is in the final stages of life. But as I heard this discussion, I came to appreciate that we often communicate different things when we mourn the loss of something. The most obvious or perhaps blatant form of this is wanting something to remain the way it is. But there are other kinds of loss which don't necessarily come primarily from a desire for things to be the same as they were. For example, I can lose something and feel great mourning, but that mourning may not be attached to wanting the thing to remain as it is. It may be a kind of sad acceptance of reality, coupled with a genuine affection for what we lose. I find that this affection is sometimes even more genuine than the previous one, because it does not insist that what we are losing stay with us to comfort us. Rather, we are able to hold the pain of loss in one hand and appreciate the loved one on the other, with a kind of sad joy and respect. I don't quite know how to say this, but I think this is a richer and deeper form of mourning, but it isn't engendering the notion that one must keep the loved one fixed in one state of being.
   It's very hard to hold the pain of loss and the joy of another in the same instance. I am not capable of it myself, so why would I bother to write about it? It's because I am exploring what it means to enjoy what we enjoy and mourn its impermanence, while embracing its ability to come out and then come back into our life again.