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Terms of Bereavement

We often deal with grief with more resilience than we might have thought possible. This is one of the interesting themes of a book reviewed in the New York Times ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/29book.html?emc=eta1

I have no hesitation with agreeing with the above contention. The ease with which people cope with tragedy is commonplace ... it would have some relation to various factors such as how 'important' financially the deceased person may have been to the grieving one.

In India certainly, it's imperative to demonstrative one's grief in a very public and melodramatic fashion. I am one who would prefer to keep grief private.

In traditional societies such as India, society plays a part in how anyone copes with a death. There are a bunch of meaningless rituals which must be complied with at all costs.

People of India being exceptionally strong believers in a benevolent God take solace in ascribing some one's death to His inscrutable will and better judgment.

Interestingly enough, I have seen people rage at God when someone in the family had an untimely death. It would appear to me childish to first of all imagine God as having any sort of a role to play in any sort of human affairs: whether it's birth, marriage, death, or anything else.

It's extraordinarily vain to think of ourselves as important enough on the scale of the universe that the Creator of the entire Universe would bother Himself with our fate.

Correct me if I am wrong ...

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