Fear the Dead
Losing someone you care about is never an easy thing. People try to take the edge off the loss by remembering the different stages of grief, by making familiar statements such as “they live on in you” or “they’re never really gone so long as we remember them,” or any variation thereof. We who are religious look forward to a future reunification. All these considerations and statements can be comforting, and there is nothing wrong with any one of them, but in the end they are just admonitions and ratiocination, both of which can have a tendency to skip off the surface of emotion, like a pebble over water, leaving the underlying feeling untouched. People react in many ways to their loss: Denial, Anger, and so on. Still others can be jealous of the dead. They might not want to share the sense of loss with others. They might come…