How to see death of a loved one philosophically without becoming hardhearted?

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Transcript

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When someone dies, we understand that quite often that sense of grief is self-centered. Not so much concerned about that other person, but about I am going to miss that person. So, how should we actually respond to death? At one level, we can say death brings us detachment from the body.
But that is not all that there is to death. Because otherwise, we can become very insensitive. There is a difference between lamenting and grieving.
Lamentation is self-centered and is pointless. But grieving is natural. Even in the Mahabharata, say when Pandu, the father of the Pandavas dies, and the Pandavas come back to the kingdom, when the rulers of the country, Bhishma and others hear that Pandu has died, they declare a statewide period of mourning.
So, mourning, that is something which is a natural expression of human emotion. So, we don’t have to go too much into a psychoanalysis of whether my grief is out of my own self-centeredness or of concern for others. It is a natural expression of emotion.
Krishna himself says in the Bhagavad Gita that the wise people do not grieve at the death of someone. But then, just 13 days after that, Krishna is speaking to the same Arjuna, after Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu has been killed in the war. And Arjuna is grief-struck.
And Krishna doesn’t go into a philosophical discourse. Remember, he is not the body, he is the soul. At that time, Krishna is sensitive.
Yes, here is the father, he has lost his son, and his words are sensitive, compassionate, and it boosts Arjuna’s morale. So, we have to be careful that an understanding of the soul shouldn’t become a license for hard-heartedness. Detachment is not hard-heartedness.
Detachment is clear-headedness. Hard-hearted means we don’t feel any emotions only. When emotions are required also, we don’t feel any emotions.
And hard-hearted people cannot have any relationships. Clear-headedness means that we understand that certain kinds of emotions are harmful for us. Certain kinds of relationships are detrimental for us.
Certain kinds of situations are unfavorable to us. And by understanding this, detachment gives us the ability to step away from those emotions, situations, and relationships. So, in that sense, detachment is clear-headedness.
It is not hard-heartedness. So, if someone is grieving at the death of some loved one, we shouldn’t be hard-hearted and think that this person is ignorant. Nor is it that if we ourselves feel grief, we have to artificially suppress the grief.
But spiritual wisdom uses a context in which that grief can be mitigated or relieved in a proper way of knowledge. And yes, the death of someone helps us to, forcefully reminds us that bodily relationships are not eternal. And that makes us think about our spiritual identity.
And of course, we can think about that person’s spiritual identity. So, the upheavals at the material level, such as death is a very tragic upheaval in one sense, they either force us to raise our consciousness upwards to the spiritual level or they drown us in undesirable, unhealthy material emotions where we become overwhelmed by negativity. So, if we are spiritually oriented, then we can use those adversities as impetuses to raise our consciousness above the material level and come to the spiritual level.
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