Through generations, perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years, custom has ordained grief for the dead, we have come to feel that it is a proof of affection or of sensitiveness or a sort of virtue: we indulge in the luxury of woe, we nurse our grief until, like a spoiled lap-dog, it becomes a burden. But we know that the unselfish dead would only be distressed at our grieving.

When we look upon the change called death as no more mysterious than any of the other changes in our bodily or mental development, which we either welcome or are unconscious of, we shall lose our terror of it either for ourselves or for others.

Our terror for others is not really for those others so much as for ourselves. The sense of “our great loss” is really a piece of selfishness. For life cannot mean one thing for us and another for our brother; as we see our own lives, so must we see the lives of those we love. The purposes of life are the same for all men, for all men are in the plan of the Spirit.

If for any reason our brother has passed from our earthly cognizance, we cannot say that we have really lost him. It is true that we do not see him with our eyes or touch him with our hands, but we have a remembrance of him in the form of a mental picture down to the minutest details of how he looked and moved, and we also have a remembrance of his spiritual character.

For the character—that sum of the abilities of those we love—remains with us after the physical form has passed away. We are affected by it just as we were when the loved one lived. We can feel the appeal that that character makes to us, its effect upon our thoughts and actions, as strongly as if the absent one stood beside us and claimed our attention. How, then, can we say he is lost?

The dead whom we have loved hold us as securely as they did when they were living; it is only that we do not see how. It has come within the experience of many that the death of father, mother, or some dearly loved one has led to the awakening of some wayward or misguided one who seemed to be wasting all the opportunities of life. We know that it was not the mere death which worked this seeming miracle. That simply woke the dormant love in the one who had hitherto desired only his own way. As soon as he became conscious of his love for the beloved one who has passed out of his earthly life, he longed to be what his beloved would have had him be, and so he turned his attention to using the opportunities of life, to the end that he might grow and develop. Thus in death the loved one held the wayward friend even more securely than he ever had in life.

We shall not fear death, even for those we love, when we have realized that it is but a passing from life to life—just as the falling leaves do not mean the annihilation of the life of the tree, but merely the end of one phase of that life. Somewhere, some time, that which was really our loved one will blossom again in the world’s experience, and even now is continuing to live through its influence upon our lives. “There is no death; what seems so is transition.” The bodily companionship with all that it implies, that we have lost: yet, if our beloved had gone to be Viceroy of India, we should miss him, but we should not put on mourning for that, nor “grieve” that we had lost his companionship.

“But we could write and hear from him and so keep in touch with him.” True: it is then for your own loss that you mourn.

Nearly all the suffering that death causes us is for ourselves. It is our feeling of helplessness, the emptiness of the earth that is left, the changed world that we look at in the sleepless hours of the night, or, when we awake in the morning, our pity for our own loss and the seeming uselessness of what remains of our existence. This consciousness of our loss numbs us so that we cannot get a realizing sense of the joys of the spirit set free from the limitations of the body. Our love is still so earthy that it demands fleshly as well as spiritual communion.

So real is our suffering when those we love best are torn from us that for a time we are inconsolable. Philosophy, religion, the affectionate ministrations of those about us, avail not to bind up the broken heart. There is but one cure for such grief—to minister to others. Unselfish devotion to a great cause—the cause of our fellows, whether in the mass or individually—is a sovereign balm for a bleeding heart.

When we understand life we know this, for we have learned that neither in joy nor in sorrow can any man live to himself. Action of any sort relieves tension and suffering. If we bottle up all our sympathy for ourselves, it becomes so tainted with selfishness and narrowness that it loses its healing qualities. But if we let that sympathy go out freely to others, forgetting our “personal” needs, it blesses them and blesses us.

A friend of mine lost a son and daughter by drowning, just as they had entered young manhood and womanhood, and for a time his grief threatened to crush him. He found no relief until he had his attention called to the sorrow of another who, through a train wreck, had lost his only child. Although a stranger to this stricken father, he sought him out and, because of his own double loss, was able to comfort him as no one else could. Moreover, the restlessness went out of his own heart; he realized his kinship with all sufferers as never before.

There is a story in “The Light of Asia” that Buddha, to comfort a mother broken-hearted over the death of her only child, sent her to get black mustard seed from a house where death had never been. The mother carried her dead babe about the village, and in each house she was offered mustard seed, but each giver said, “Death has been here.” At last she realized that she was not the only sufferer, that death was a necessary accompaniment of life as shadow is a necessary accompaniment of light. Her grief, she saw, was but a part of the common sorrow. The recognition that either joy or sorrow is common to all increases the healing sense of unity, it is a “touch of nature” that “makes the whole world kin.” There is no wrong in our grieving, if it comforts us: but to look thus each for himself dispassionately at the cause and the nature of his grief, will surely give so clear a view of it that it will no longer deprive us of sleep.

Then why lose sleep worrying about what we know to be merely a change?