Philosophy
fromPsychology Today
2 days agoEulogies: Timing Is Important
Eulogies honor the dead, and withholding them from the living avoids morbid implications and social debt created by positive, biased praise.
My prediction is based on only two assumptions. First, our visitors from space can die; they are not immortal. Second, they care about each other. When one of their own dies, they mourn them, just as humans do. These assumptions, I think, will have led these aliens to invent gods and a belief in the afterlife. Belief in the afterlife, where we defeat death and are reunited with loved ones who have died, is the basis of all past and current religions.
The war has ended, and it's time for me to return to my coffee, my bread and my poetry. Yet I don't know what it means to return to life, after death has lived within us down to the marrow. Death had us memorised by heart, reciting our names one by one with unwavering precision. We grew accustomed to it too, in all its forms and colours, until funerals became a daily ritual, much like a weather report we already know by heart.