Its a hard lesson to learn nevertheless a most poignant one. To lose, to feel sad, to feel bad, to grieve and mourn and finally to let go. It is only life and its ups and downs that may bring us to face these hard subjects, otherwise, we all do our best to avoid them. It is but natural to slip aside, to try and bypass the rough and tough paths, and its only when we are by force placed in front, aside, and on all sides by misery do we stop and take notice and say that this is life.
Humans have progressed immensely over the past hundreds of years, we have learnt so much about our own bodies and how they work, we have made leaps in understanding our behavior and its peculiarities. Research is made into why we behave the way we do under different circumstances, theoretically we all know what happiness is, what is fulfilment, what is sadness, loss, feelings of powerlessness and other negative emotions. Positive feelings make us feel good about ourselves and we take them in stride, as though such feelings are the only natural feelings that must be experienced by us. A person satisfied and happy rarely questions his bliss, he may thank his stars and god (that is if he believes in one) but more or less he accepts the happiness as his by right, as if there wasn't another way of being. In opposition to this, a man who has lost a loved one feels sad, angry, depressed, and lost, he does not behave with decorum and calm acceptance, he questions the heavens and cries his heart out as to why has he been singled out for this misfortune while others are blessed.
What I'm trying to say is, that we are not taught to take negative feelings as an accepted part of life. From early on we tell our children that any kind of loss is equivalent to failure, of not being complete, a consequence of our bad choice or our wrong and mindless behavior. Happiness and success is parallel to good decisions though it may or may not be a result of them, but we in hindsight like to think so.
Death is another taboo, considering that its the only certain fact of life and that too of every single person's life we go through life pretending it will never come. And when we lose someone close to us to its dark angel we are confounded! we feel cheated, we are in sheer shock and dilemma as to what has happened!!! We cannot believe that death has struck so close to home, because we are never conditioned to think of death apart from being a very horrible thing after which we may encounter a wrathful God who would bring us to task almost like a headmaster of a boarding school from hell (pardon the pun)
I don't know how to feel bad, when I do feel depressed or sad, or down and out my first instinct is to escape that feeling. I cannot grieve for loss of my loved ones to this life and to death because time and again I feel that fate has played a ruse, that I have been singled by God ( yes the self same headmaster like God) to be punished (for all crimes of heart and soul, committed, thought about, dreamt and read of) and life is unfair because others around me do not have it this tough. I cannot cry for my father because I'm scared that if for once I let myself cry I'd never be able to stop, I do not even want to remember him and feel sad because I don't know how to do that, if I start I'm scared to tumble down so dark a crevasse that it would be hard for me to ever see light again. I simply don't know what to make up of all the losses that I have encountered? what do I do with this plateful of failures and loses? Is there an SOP to handle them? Where do I begin?
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