I think grief may highlight the oddities of humanity more than any other emotion available. Humans are irrational creatures on most occasions, but grief accentuates our strange thought processes. We experience grief in our weakest moments, when we are vulnerable and shaken, and we seem to seek relief from areas even most speculative, even more so than those sought in the midst of pain. I worry that perhaps sometimes we choose less useful avenues of escape over accepting the painful depths of our grief. I think back on my own brushes with grief and find such evidence.

My grandfather in Michigan was seen by many in the family as a patriarch of a noble lineage that we all were duty-bound to maintain in the younger generations. There was attributed to him a particular level of honor and wisdom that separated him from most others even his own age, which made his eventual decline from Alzheimer’s all the more difficult to witness. Upon his death the family at large not only saw the loss of a father, grandfather, or great-grandfather, but also the departure of a rarified individual whose knowledge and experience may not be matched in our lifetimes. His history seemed to almost become legendary even before his death: I felt that our efforts to record his memories were rooted in his life stories achieving a sort of mythical status over the more personal process of wanting to remember him as accurately as we could manage. Years later, I still can’t be certain in my own thoughts whether I can consider him a mere man, despite it potentially making those memories sweeter. I wonder if perhaps he will forever be something more in my memories.

Am I really serving his memory well by seeing him as something more than a husband and father? I wonder if he would have wanted to be a heroic figure in the minds of his family, or if instead would he have wanted something more humble attributed to him. I think losing him in what seems now to be such an early part of my own life impacted the way I perceived my own life for many years afterward. I had deep anxieties about living up to the myth built around his life and the seemingly meagre existence I had eked out by that time. My own death began to grow in significance in my mind, for not only did I see it as the point at which I would once again see my grandfather, but it would also mark the time where my ability to make change for the sake of the family line would end.

But why didn’t I just mourn the loss of someone important? Why did it get mixed up in something so much bigger? It took longer for me to say goodbye by getting it all tangled up in history I never witnessed. The man I knew was one who enjoyed gardening, growing flowers and vegetables for the neighborhood farmer’s market, who liked to chat it up at the dining room table, who liked playing with his young grandchildren and sharing the toys he purchased on his trips to Florida in the winter. That was my grandfather, but I didn’t feel comfortable just saying goodbye to that version of him: I felt that I had to add more to honor his memory, and it distorted my grief. It took time for me to let parts of him fall away to mourn what remained in my mind — someone who appeared far more human.

When my old employer committed suicide for his alleged abuse of a child, I advocated for his probable innocence instead of accepting that I may have been a friend to someone capable of such actions. I claimed that we should honor his memory by not omitting his name from our conversation, or that perhaps the allegations were far less serious than anyone thought, or that perhaps this was all a misunderstanding and we were too quick to condemn a potentially innocent man. It took me years to accept I could and was most likely wrong to defend the man. My grief was not only related to his actions, but for my own lack of insight into the mind of that man. I felt ashamed that my proximity to the man offered no warning clues for me to act on before he chose to not only harm a child but also himself.

I felt shame in feeling joy in remembering our conversations. His kindness to me felt wrong to accept posthumously. I felt dirty being associated with his memory, but it also felt like a betrayal to forget the impact he played in my life. He gave me furniture to furnish my small apartment. He helped pay for a flight and expedite my passport approval so that I could visit a friend in South Korea. He tutored me in my first real corporate job in my career, guiding me through the process of preparing a magazine each month. He was a friend, but he was also probably not as great a man as I built him in my mind to be, and that time around his death still hurts.

I didn’t allow myself to simply be sad that a friend died. My grief had heightened my anxiety, made my shock at learning what had happened turn to shame and embarrassment, and transformed my fondness for the man into defensiveness, railing against the differing opinions of others as if they were targeting me instead of the deceased. It took years for me to be able to just be sad that I lost a friend who had made terrible choices.

Pain triggers such basic parts of our brain that our rational mind can be stripped away. When the pain lesses, it offers us the chance to reconsider our actions and question our choices, providing a moment for us to build defenses for similar moments in the future. Preventing pain can be useful in places such as fire drills, but sometimes I think it can hinder our growth. When I look back at the painful moments of my life, I wonder if some of the methods I used to ease my pain in the moment ended up delaying my healing. I wonder if in my search for relief, I chose to pursue some options that might not be as reasonable as their alternatives. I was scrambling to find something to give me a reason to not have to grieve and feel the depth of my sorrow.

When my grandfather died, I searched for a reason for why his death was prolonged, with his memory fading, his abilities diminishing, until he died in a comatose state, unable to wake from the fall he experienced in his final days. I tried to find meaning in his death, or evidence of his death being a catalyst for something better to come, but everything just came back to him dying and no longer being present. When my employer died, I bargained with the evidence and tried to convince myself that he was not the guilty man people claimed and that his suicide was more noble than cowardly, but no amount of campaigning for his legacy helped me see him back in the office again; he was still dead.

Death is the constant across all borders, cultures, and beliefs. But what I’ve noticed throughout my experiences with funerals is that people shy away from the death and focus on platitudes, seeking to escape the pain of grief. I think that this might be a mistake. Fully feeling the grief might be a wiser choice, along with the acceptance that no matter what one believes, everyone experiences the same reality that the person no longer is present here, where the survivors remain. Some people believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation, or just the end of existence after death, but the reality of death is that the person one loves is gone now and the reality of that hurts deeply. I have only been able to heal by grappling with the things that I know about death. I think that we delay our healing and add more anxiety to our life by diminishing the importance of what we know in favor of the things that we hope to be true. I think that we run from grief like we run from pain, attempting to hide or ignore it until it disappears. But it doesn’t disappear, it metastasizes and expands into something more permanent and disabling, and it takes a lot more pain to seek it out and remove it, and we might never recover from the damage it caused along the way.

I look back on my experiences with grief and I believe I handled each moment poorly. I should have been more ready to sit down and actually mourn for those who I lost, instead of bottling it, pretending it doesn’t hurt, seeking to explain it away, or even denying that it actually mattered that much. Every death of a loved one does matter, and not because of anything other than because that loved one died. I don’t need to have any greater reason than that to mourn, and I need not find any deeper meaning to the loss other than they are now absent from my life and I don’t like that. Weaving beliefs, myths, legends, noble causes, deep meanings, or any other potential inaccuracies into the life and death of an individual to explain their existence and then non-existence on Earth is to deny the beauty of them simply being here with me for a time. The people I love matter not because they did something, made certain choices, said certain things, or did whatever was necessary to satisfy the acceptance of others. People just matter, and those whom I love matter most to me.

The process of accepting a death doesn’t have to be more complicated that that, but grief keeps getting in the way and causing distractions.