It is difficult to remind ourselves, while consumed with a difficult situations, that we are walking away from the experience with newfound lessons and knowledge. Often while we are engaged in the situation we are angry, anxious, or even depressed. No other situation can achieve all of these emotions such as losing a dear loved on from a death. Just as one who newly discovers that their death is imminent, so too do the family and friends who surround the dying also goes through their own process of death. However, how much of an impact it has on those around the dying person, depends on how deep that relationship goes. Although all death is mourned in some fashion, there is a big difference between morning the death of someone who we met a week prior and morning the death of someone we’ve known for years.
Yet, every individual who comes into your path has a lesson for you to learn, whether that individual was only associated with you for a couple of hours or whether you grew up with that individual. Life is merely a collection of lessons to learn from, and the teacher of those lessons are the individuals who crosses your path.
The longer you’ve known a person is instrumental in how deep and hard the lessons are for you to learn. This is why we mourn more from a parent than a friend, and we mourn our friend more than a co-worker. However, the interesting thing is, although we may only mourn a co-worker to some degree by attending their funeral to pay our last respects, but we aren’t necessarily completely broken up by the loss to the extend we would have been should it had been a parent or a sibling. That’s because the parent or sibling can offer a deeper degree of experiences than the co-worker. Alternatively, the co-worker may be a parent or a sibling themselves, and therefore provided hard lessons and experiences to their family. There is a remarkable difference between perspectives that must be acknowledged. Once we’ve acknowledged this perspective, we then learn the lessons they have left behind.