Dealing With Tragedy And Loss

The mind is a very powerful thing.

What is a tragedy?

Our social conditioning teaches us to interpret events like the death of a loved one, a natural disaster, or a permanent disability as tragic. To experience emotional pain when such things occur is considered perfectly normal behavior.

There’s even a process we’re expected to follow: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages were defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying as the 5 Stages of Dealing with Catastrophic Loss, later popularized as the 5 Stages of Grief. You can find many variations on this, but the basic pattern is that we must experience the pain of the loss and then (hopefully) get over it and move on.

Of course, many people never complete the “getting over it” part. For some people a tragic loss becomes a death sentence. They simply give up on their lives. Game over.

What defines a tragedy? Nothing but our thinking makes it so. A tragedy is a form of attachment to circumstances. When you become attached to circumstances and then experience an outcome that runs afoul of your expectations, emotional pain is the natural result. And the greater the attachment, the greater the pain.

Suppose your favorite pet dies suddenly. For many people this is a tragic experience. But is it the loss of the animal’s life that defines the tragedy? Not at all, especially considering those pet owners who’ll happily pay someone to put their dinner animals to death before eating them. What’s the difference between the pet and the meal? Emotional attachment. Where there’s no attachment, there’s no sense of tragedy.

I was taught from a young age that it’s appropriate to be attached to circumstances. Moreover, I was taught which level of attachment was appropriate for each set of circumstances. I was conditioned to feel a certain way when certain events occurred.

For example:

Death of a loved one = tragedy. Death of a stranger = news.
Killing a dog = cruelty. Killing a pig = dinner.
Americans killed = terrorism. Americans killing = heroism.

Current social conditioning still encourages us to think in terms of our emotional attachments. Consider the “Support our troops” slogan that you’ll often see on car bumper stickers in the USA now. Support our troops… but not theirs. We’re supposed to be attached to one set of human beings but not the other. Us vs. them. Me vs. not me.

On average over 150,000 people die on this planet every single day. That’s more than a million a week. Given those figures why should the deaths of people we know be any more tragic than the deaths of people we don’t? If we’re going to eventually confront the 5 Stages of Grief, why not do it up front? Move past denial and over to acceptance right now.

The dead do not require that we suffer upon their departure. All the pain we create is our own — by allowing ourselves to adopt a disempowering, fear-based context

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