On Life and Loss
And the nature of reality as we close out 2024.
I’ll preface this with saying it’ll be a different kind of post than my usual political and social commentary. That said, it’s something I’ve thought a lot about and thus feel like it belongs, well, in A Moment with Mumma.
It’s also a bit meandering, dare I say, weave-y. But I wanted to get this out in 2024, and I think topics like death are naturally quite non-linear in the thoughts it provokes.
Provoking this post: the week before Thanksgiving, we got some very unwelcome news. Two of the ~160 or so people we had at our wedding had passed away unexpectedly. They were completely unrelated and we found out one day apart, making it quite a one-two punch.
Both were young, 49 and 33, and leave behind far too much sorrow for their loved ones. The pain of seeing parents bury their children, a wife or fiancé losing their life partner, and kids losing their dad is each uniquely and incomparably painful.
It’s so hard to figure out what to say to people who just lost a loved one. The best I can describe it is some frantic series of empathetic second guessing. Should you smile when you see them, or make a sad puppy dog face (for lack of a better term)? Is saying “I’m sorry for your loss” too cliche? If you say “I wish I would have gotten to know them better,” would they take that positively or negatively, because you didn’t really know them and why are you at the funeral anyway? Are they still mourning, or are they trying to get over their grief, and what if you say something that implies the wrong one?
I have no great answer to these questions. I have heard from someone in the past that just saying something, anything, is always appreciated, which makes sense. If I have to put myself in those shoes of losing a loved one, I’d just want to hear from people, and would be generally gracious in forgiving any perceived faux pas.
I mention that basic challenge as it is certainly one that everyone faces when encountering a tragic loss. And while the discomfort and the sorrow are hard, I do think funerals and confronting such tragedies provides many meaningful lessons for all of us.
It’s these lessons that I’d like to focus on. Or at least, what I took from both funerals and learning more about both Trung and Abi.
The one thing I have tried to do, and strongly believe in, is to find one thing about the person who died that you can try to emulate in your life moving forward. It’s a way to honor those who died and, by selecting a positive trait, make both yourself a better person and the world a better place as a result. To share a couple brief anecdotes:
Trung was incredibly humble despite being a very successful businessman. He’d swing by my in-laws house (his elder cousin) every lunar new year as suggested by Vietnamese tradition to honor his elders. That’s of course just one example, but notable as adherence to that tradition tends to drop, but Trung made sure to do it every year. That’s one example, but it’s clear that this humility and care was a constant in his life for family and friends in his life.
Abi had an infectious enthusiasm for life and there are a myriad of anecdotes to choose from to reflect that. But having seen it first hand I can tell you that it was truly genuine. The most clear example that we heard about was tennis, where his passion for all aspects of the game convinced many of his friends to take up an interest in tennis. Beyond tennis though he brought that genuine enthusiasm with him almost everywhere he went.
As you can expect, those are the two traits that I am going to try to emulate and incorporate into my day-to-day life. How well I will execute on either remains to be seen, but I do know that both are lessons that I will keep with me for a long time.
Beyond that step, confronting death brings with it a lot of questions, none of which have clear answers.
How will the loved ones of the deceased be able to come to terms with such tragedy and get back to living a normal life?
What is the best way to support the loved ones of the deceased? Do you share in their sorrow or try to cheer them up? What stage of grief are they at and how can you help?
What is out there after death anyway? Each religion has its own version of an after-death story, but honestly, how would we know what is beyond a one-way trip?
Why does anything even exist in the first place? Sure, there was a “Big Bang” we think, but what started the “bang” anyway? Why was there a little pin prick of matter even there in the first place? Whether your belief is in a god or that we are in some alien civilization’s advanced simulation, there’s still the pretty big question of how they, or anything, came to exist in the first place.
As stated atop, I don’t have answers to any of this, other than to say I know what I want to believe.
If I died, I would want everyone I love to return to happiness (after at least a little requisite mourning), and value all the days that they have. I’d want them to take less for granted and be more thankful for what they do have, all the health and happiness that is there, even if things aren’t perfect.
As alluded to above, I’d want people to just show up to support my loved ones if I died, or to support me if one of my loved ones passes away. Any funeral is also a clear reminder that death has a 100% win rate, and that we will all face the deaths of our loved ones at some point as surely as the sun will rise again in the east tomorrow.
After death, I want there to be something more. There is so much more to experience in this world, let alone in any others. The concept of reincarnation is fascinating to me: could it be that we are all just advanced beings subjecting ourselves to some kind of advanced video game so immersive that we don’t realize we’re in it? Has it all been crafted as some big reality TV show for an advanced alien race? What if we’re all just part of the same sentient entity amusing themselves by creating entire galaxies in their mind?
These sound outlandish, but the fact is we have no idea what the universe really is. Science, as advanced as it may seem to us, is still a fairly basic tool and unable to prove or disprove any of these hypotheses. Whatever the case, I just want to learn more: from more experiences in this world, and of course a bit more (or a lot more) about the true nature of reality.
And why is there a universe, or anything, in the first place? I’ve got no idea. There would seem no concrete reason for anything to exist at all. That makes me hopeful that there is some kind of benevolent all-powerful being out there, even if we can’t uncover such an existence through our conventional tools. Presumably, they may not even know why anything is here in the first place. Even if the question is rather immaterial to how to live, it’s still a mind-bending thing to ponder.
One last thing I’ll say is that the permanence of death (at least from our viewpoint) is perhaps one of the most striking things. Whether purely child-like or encouraged by video games, there’s a desire as soon as you start thinking about it to be like “oh, we should undo that,” before you quickly remember that you can’t. There is no undo button, no extra life. This feeling recurs, even weeks later. This naturally brings a sense of powerlessness that is humbling to us all. For as much as humans have advanced and started to create brilliant machines of our own, none of us can escape death, at least in this world.
Initially I felt this was a strange post to share at the end of the year/start of a new year. Christmas is about birth and the New Year similarly is about fresh starts. But reflecting on it, I think it works quite well as a reminder for all of us that life is mysterious and unpredictable and that we should take every opportunity we get in 2025 to enjoy life, be thankful for what we have, and try to make the world a bit better of a place.