How To Cope With Death

Death is guaranteed, there is no getting away from it. We all know this though we don't always know how to become okay with it or how to cope with it. 

I've had family members die from old age or from being alcoholics. I've had friends dying from overdoses and suicide. I've had friends that have been murdered. I've seen quite a few different sides of death and so I'm going to share what I've learned through the process.

Grieving Process

There is always a grieving process.

Don't try to speed it up.

Don't try to not feel it.

Don't try to keep yourself busy 

These are just ways to repress your emotions which you don't want to do that.

Feel It

If you can't allow yourself to experience the lowest of lows you won't be able to experience the highest of highs. Try to feel it as a beautiful experience just as you experience the most beautiful, amazing, and loving parts of your life. Death can also be beautiful and it's part of the human experience. So just allow yourself to feel it and know there is no right or wrong way.

Experience It

People experience things in different ways but as far as grief is concerned. One of the best ways I've heard it explained is that it's kind of like waves.

In the beginning, when someone that you love passes away it's like going into the ocean and the waves are 100 feet tall. They just keep crashing on you and you can barely come up for air. It’s like getting swept up and every single emotion will come up. Sadness will come up. Fear will come out and you're just getting hit constantly and rocked by these waves.

Then time starts to pass and the waves start to come a little bit less frequently but when they do come they're still a hundred feet tall and they still throw you upon the rocks and you try to get up and try to have some form of air to come up.

As time goes on, you tend to process and you know the waves will still come but instead of being a hundred feet tall, they might be 50 feet tall and they might get to 30 feet tall and then 20 feet tall.

Then after a while, they come unexpectedly, it could be a year or two years down the road.

It might be like a song that you hear which hits you again and again and you can't help but be overcome with emotion. It might be driving past a certain part of town and seeing a gas station where you have a memory with that person.

Feel the waves, experience the feeling.

The human experience is a beautiful thing. Usually, the highs we experience are beautiful, why not try and let the lows be beautiful too.

If you have somebody who has passed away, write down the two, three four, or five things that you loved most about them.

Wake up every single morning and take 5 minutes to pause and read it. Close your eyes and think about how you can embody these aspects throughout the day. If you do that, what you will realize is you start to become a part of the person that you loved the most.

Pain Versus Suffering

Pain is inevitable. 

You can't go through this life without some form of pain. You're going to have scars in this lifetime, in any lifetime.

Suffering is optional.

Pain is the feeling that you feel from the loss of someone. Suffering is the resistance to someone's death, which then makes it even worse. It is an unnecessary part of it.

Most of the time the suffering comes from not accepting. There's the pain of the event which is inevitable. It's part of being a human.  The suffering is not accepting it and wishing that it was different. There is no other way that it could have happened because it didn't happen any other way.

You have to learn to accept that suffering comes when you are resisting the way that the world is. There's nothing you can do about it because it is in the past. The only thing that you can do something about is you. So you have to learn to accept. 

I heard from Baba Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher who passed away about a year and a half ago, that a soul does not leave this plane a second too soon or a second too late. It happens exactly when it is supposed to happen.

Let the grieving be, feel it, experience it, ride the waves but most of all let it be beautiful by remembering the beauty of the one who has passed.

Your Own Death

It's going to happen and most people are terrified of it. You might as well figure out a way to become at least a little bit more okay with it.

As you now know, I see death as a beautiful part of life. We are dying at every single second.

It gives your life urgency. If you didn't have to die, if you were immortal, you'd always have tomorrow. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. If you take life and look at it that way you realize that you should bring your life some urgency and urgency in a good way. 

A phrase that I heard around stoicism is that stoicism doesn't take away human emotions, it domesticates them. It makes you understand the emotions, feel them and be able to work through them and process them in real-time.

The Stoics used ‘Memento Mori’, which means remember that you have to die, to invigorate life. 

How often do you think about death? I think about it every day, sometimes 5 times a day, or 10 times a day, because it brings an urgency to my life. My only real fear is that I'm going to get to my deathbed and wish that I had done something more to bring out my true potential for the world. I do believe we all feel that way.

By bringing urgency into your life you open yourself up to experience, even more, not only the beautiful stuff but the hard stuff too, and maybe to bring out all of the potentials that you feel that you have inside yourself so that when you do get to that day you know you're ready and that you've done all that you can. 

When you bring urgency into your life, there is more reason to get off the couch, get off Instagram, do the things you want to do, impact the world and the people around you, to bring out your true potential.

When you can accept that everyone that you know is going to die, even you, and you can see it as a beautiful thing then you have created a space for your thoughts around death to bring more positive things to your life than negative ones.

Check out new episodes of The Mindset Mentor podcast every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

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