Welcome! This blog is my humble effort to help people face death without fear, and find real happiness amidst grief. Death, dying, and grief are all topics most of us don’t even like to think about. But the irony is that, facing death and dying allows us to actually experience deep inner happiness and freedom– it allows us to actually live.
This has been a deeply personal journey for me. Some of my earliest memories are all related to grief and death.
Facing death
The only memory I have of my paternal grandfather is from his funeral. I was 3 when my Grandfather passed away. He was a much respected military man who was heavily involved in community programs and sports programs until a few months before his death. At the chapel, I have a clear memory of looking up at my father who asked me, “Do you want to see his body?” And I said yes, and my father lifted me up to see my grandfather’s dead body in the open casket. It was a grand funeral with helicopters flying over and dropping red roses and rose petals on his hearse and the crowd and gun salutes.
Open air cremations
Then, when I was 4, two people my parents knew passed away within months of each other and my parents brought us to both funerals. These funerals were not like ones I’d been to before- they were traditional Hindu/Vedic open-air cremations. I witnessed the solemn prayers and ceremonies. The rituals that signified the end of that soul’s particular body and gave thanks to the earth and to the Supreme Person, while also wishing the particular souls well in their journeys forward.
A deadly earthquake
Perhaps it was also my experience of surviving one of the worst earthquakes in my home country- also when I was 4, wherein over 3,000 people died. There were so many dead, and the city morgue, which we would always need to drive past to go anywhere, was partially ruined by the earthquake and obviously could not cope with the number of fatalities, so the dead were piled right by the road and simply hidden behind white sheets that would blow open at the slightest breeze. I would always look away in fear whenever we drove past there.
These things combined with very vivid nightmares I would have from ages 4-7 of death and dying also compounded my extreme fear of death. As a child I was always so fearful that my parents would die. If they were only slightly late I would think that maybe they got into an accident, and my siblings and I were now orphans.
Death, everywhere
Into my teen years, I had witnessed many more funerals. My parents would do their best to comfort others at the funerals of our dear family members, neighbors, and friends. Growing up, I had a very intense desire to care for others, which my father encouraged and indulged by allowing me to have all kinds of pets, who I cherished and loved, and lost. There were times, when I would sit with a dying pet and would cry and worry and grieve, months before they actually passed. Everywhere I looked, I seemed to see and experience death everywhere. But it was these different experiences set me forward on a path to try to learn as much as I could about death. I felt that was the only way for me to overcome my fear of death and shake the death anxiety that plagued me.
My journey to overcome the fear of death has brought happiness and meaning to my life
My finding freedom from the fear of death or from death anxiety and learning to face fear has now been a journey of over 30 years, and I will be sharing what I have learned on this blog with the hopes that you will face death and by doing so, learn to live a happier, more meaningful life, just as I have.
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