How to deal with memories of loss and death?

The following excerpt is from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Acharya Ji, my father passed away four years ago, but still I miss him and he is in my memory. I don’t know how to deal with this condition. What is this all about?

Acharya Prashant:

You want to remember him as a body, as a person, and body can do no better than stay merely in your memories. The more we think of ourselves as a body, the more we will think of our loved ones as bodies.

And bodies have no other place in the universe.

If they are gross, they can be touched as material objects — material objects outside of you. Here you are taking of yourself as the body, and outside this body is, this object. And if this object is gone or destroyed, then the only other place this can be found is in the brain — in the brain, as a material configuration.

It’s material even when it is in the outside world, the world outside your body. And it remains material even when it is in the brain.

You very well know that all memories are stored in the brain, as something material. Therefore if you disturb the configuration of the brain, the memories also get disturbed. We have talked about it, right? If you hammer somebody’s brain he is likely to lose his memories, just as a hard disk upon falling to the ground is likely to lose it’s memory, because memory too is material.

We have limited our loved one to a body even when he is in front of us, and even after he is gone and is no more in front of us.

As your own body-identification will diminish, so would your insistence on memorisation.

When you will see who you really are, you will also start seeing who your dad really was. You wouldn’t even say, “Was.” ‘Was’, ‘is’, ‘would be’, are terms that pertain only to material. Then you would not even relish talking of him as a deceased one.

Remember that in his demise, it is your own death that you fear. When you become free of the thought of death, it would be no more very appealing to you to think of your father as somebody who has passed away.

As long as the one we love is merely a body, there is bound…