In the world certain things and events have meaning and value for people as individuals. That is to say, they are respectively not just neutral objects and happenings, they have significance, they stand out for attention and to be noted while in addition they are thought to have more or less value. Both the meaning and value are derived from thought, emotion and associated actions. Overarchingly they are derived from our engagement in the world.
Some of these meanings and values are shared with others, but some are highly individual or shared only with a few who are close, such as family and friends. These meanings and values often arise not only from predilections and preferences, but also from the process of shared lives.
Think for example of a family home in which there occurs the death of the last to leave and the resulting collation of not just the objects in it but also the events that happened there. This is the auditorium of one’s life, what gives it body and form. When one dies, if one is the last to go, one is just left with a detritus of objects and the ghost of events, actions and happenings, and then in turn those objects are removed or heading away from each other forever, the places where those events took place are overlaid and rubbed out by new ones, until not a trace remains that once had the meaning or value it did. Other events and places apart from homes can have similar meaning and value to the individual, and those meanings and values, that gave sense of what one’s life is, are similarly extinguished upon death. Such meanings and values are both part of who we are and extensions of ourselves into the world.
When we die, if there is no-one to remember these personal meanings and values, they evaporate and vanish with our death. This is hard to face for most people. That all those objects, events and places that had the meaning and value they had for them just disappear as having those meanings and values. It is as if they never were, and consequently as they are tied to individual people, as if these people never were also. People need a way of dealing with this. To not be quite forgotten. They do not want it to be as though what had meaning and value in the end really had no meaning and value. It is hard enough when partings, removals and destructions take place when we are alive, but when we are dead, the annihilation is final and there is no possibility of setting up anew and imbuing a new beginning with meanings and values.
One way to face up to the reality of it is to bear it. When you die, the meanings things had for you, their value to you, die with you. Even if this might be the truth of the matter and the rational thing to believe, it’s non-rationally understandable that people believe, or somewhat less firmly, hope-believe, that something else is the case, and that the meanings and …
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