We Don't Exist
I attended a funeral of a distant grandma recently.
I was observing the rituals and got to see how it was all being done. Rituals about the dead in India are pretty involved, extending days and years even after the cremation.
What caught me by surprise was my own orientation and reaction towards seeing someone dead. What I first noticed is that when I looked at them, It really was like seeing someone being asleep. Except I knew by fact they were dead or they would not be being prepped for being burned. Which then flipped my perspective the other way. It was like a computer without electricity. That what lies before my eyes, is now totally "useless". So useless in fact, that burning it or burying it are about the only valid options left.
It isn't the person everyone is crying for at all. That person isn't there anymore. That's why we're burning it. It's just the physical carriage left now. That person now only exists in the memory of those who witnessed them, and nowhere else. People aren't really crying for the dead, they're really crying because a part of their own persons were built out of the now-gone person. A very real part of them is lost.
The problem though is that the person never really existed. You see, all the people we value in our life, don't really exist. Because all the things which are real exist in some form. The atoms which one body disintegrates into never go away. Energy is conserved always. The same atoms the dinosaurs were made of, we're made of too. And we're all made of Earth itself. But the persons, the personalities, where are they?
What this leads us to is the question - what are we really? We all will die one day. Our personalities will be stored in our online footprint, in the things we made, in the people who saw us. And all of these things again, are not physical, but only exist in patterns.
I think by painting death as bad, we've denied ourselves a major truth about what we really are. That we don't exist at all. Which simultaneously makes us immortal.