Is Disappointment a Form of Attachment

 Ever since I left the Buddhist Text Studies class last week, I have been haunted by questions that are analogous to: is it ethically wrong to mourn at a funeral, from a Buddhist perspective? According to the strictly doctrinal interpretations of Buddhist scriptures about death, weeping during a person's death is bound to create difficulties as the consciousness transitions to a new existence. Some have proposed the answer to be something like: weep and mourn inwardly, but don't "outwardly" express it, and try to stay calm and grounded for the other. Yet, this entire question raises related questions for me, such as, are there truly illegitimate expressions of emotion in Buddhism? Aren't humans entitled to emotional expressions to cherish the lives of other beings? Such questions have me wondering.
  Now my latest question to wrestle with: is disappointment a form of attachment? This again is a tricky question, because what do we mean by "disappointment"? I would have to propose from the outset that disappointment is attachment. After all, is the act of being disappointed not a sign that we have attached an image of who we think someone is, thinking it is a real person we are seeing? At the same time, however, I am ambivalent about this, because some forms of disappointment might come across as forms or at least signs of love and care. Consider a mother's disappointment that her daughter does not call her to say she is coming home late after a party. The daughter might argue with her mom (if she is a Buddhist) by saying that mother is too attached to her daughter's whereabouts, and suffers as a result. However, we would not expect mothers to be like this to their children? It seems to me that 'disappointment' with a child's behavior might be one of the job hazards that go with the territory of being a parent! And the same goes with all relationships in general. As long as we have expectations, we will occasionally feel disappointment over their not being met. Can we learn to simply let go of expectations altogether when it comes to loved ones? I suppose the answer depends on how well our spiritual practice has been going.
   I think that ethically speaking, at the end of the day, we need to be clear about where our emotions come from. It's not about saying "this emotion is bad; get rid of it", but more a question of being able to discern its nature and origin. If I am clearly aware that there is nobody in the universe who ever makes me feel disappointed with someone's behavior, then I can take ownership for the emotion itself. It's there and I can observe the emotion much as I would watch the breath during meditation practice. If I know that the emotion is created from my mind's way of seeing and relating to things (with cravings, aversion, ignorance, and so on), then I can accept the conditions that give rise to the disappointment without blaming anyone in the process (including myself). It's as though the disappointment were clinically observed through a microscope, then let go of over time. Is there any need to suppress that emotion? Not really because when we are not trying to figure out who caused the emotion, it naturally goes away on its own and loses its power, because there is no narrative built up around self/others by way of that emotion.