When we reflect on what actually happens in cases of bereavement, we shall find great diversity in different situations. It may be that the deceased person has led a worthless life, and that the grave is allowed to close over him without much regret. Nevertheless, the honor due to worth that never appeared in him ought to be shown. In the worst cases we may not treat human beings like animals. Besides, there are generally one or more persons who seem to have an unreasoning natural affection for the wretched being, and so he does not go wholly without the tribute of tears. Others, like sufferers from cancer, pass through days, weeks, months of acute pain before they die. In their case it is said that death comes as a relief, and often the final relief from the suffering obscures the loss.  
Again, in most men’s lives there is an upper and an under side. Though the public career of statesmen, poets, artists may be dazzling, yet their faults or obliquities are probably well enough known to those who have seen them at close range. Obituaries are seldom truthful. Sometimes, however, the reverse happens; men whose names are held up to public obloquy are not always as black as they are painted. Their worst side163 becomes known to the public, yet they sometimes possess wonderfully fine traits.
 
Very pathetic is the mourning for a baby, and its unfulfilled promise, or for a defective child, long a burden, yet strangely grieved for when its feeble little flame of life is extinguished.
 
The most poignant sorrow is that which cannot be communicated to others or shared by others, because the tie severed by bereavement, like that of husband and wife, is between two only. The loss by death of a beloved life companion is apt to lead to an inconsolable state of mind, because in this relation, when finely interpreted, the empirical and the spiritual appear almost to coincide. The ethical rule, Live in the life of another, live so as to enhance to the highest degree the possibilities of another, seems almost no longer a counsel of perfection but an actual experience. Hence the utter grief into which the sundering of the tie is apt to plunge the survivor. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards said on his deathbed to his wife: “Our relation has been spiritual, and therefore is eternal.” And there is indeed an element of eternality in marriage, only it is not the sex relation as such that is or can be conceived of as eternal. It is not man and woman in their empirical form to which this attribute belongs. Marriage is the sign; the spiritual relation that which is signified.48
 
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It may be objected that marriage being a tie strictly between two, one can hardly think without repugnance of an equally intimate, nay, far more intimate, relation with all spiritual beings whatsoever. Yet the spiritual relation is one in which the ethical being is conceived to be in touch with each of the infinite beings that comprise the spiritual universe, pouring its essential life into them, and receiving theirs in return. Is not then the sign incompatible with and contradictory to the thing signified? But it is not of the multitude of mortal men and women surrounding us that we think when we speak of the eternal hosts. From this surrounding swarm of mortals, we retreat, taking refuge in the inmost privacy which we share with one other only. Yet this very inmost intimacy, so far as it is pure, is the emblem of that pure intercourse of essential being with essential being in which we are related to all.49
 
Following up the subject of bereavement, we find the following consolations employed:
 
The first to be mentioned is,165 “Bow to the inevitable.” I include this because frustration is inevitable, on account of the discrepancy between the finite and the infinite order, and because we are to use inevitable frustration for the purpose of experiencing the reality of the ideal. But without this use in mind, the inevitable presents itself as a mere blind necessity, in which we can see neither right nor reason, a hostile doom that simply crushes us. The psychological effect of the thought of an event as inevitable, it is true, is in any case calming, but the tranquillity thus induced is a heavy and hopeless one. And those who accept the inevitable in this stupefying manner often become meaner in their way of living. The light of life is for them extinguished. They put up perhaps with creature comforts, or with work that merely keeps the mind occupied, and prevents it from fretting the wound, thus allowing slow time to cicatrize it.
 
There is, however, a larger way in which a materialist may regard the inevitable. The world in his view being a vast machine, he may, as it were, identify himself with the machine, and thereby rise in thought superior to the injury it inflicts on him. But though we can imagine someone thus deadening his feelings when he himself is the victim, we cannot well conceive of the same remedy applying when a beloved person, say an only child, is being crushed under the Juggernaut car of the world-machine. The great test of one’s philosophy of life is whether it helps us in the case of those whom we love, rather than in the case of the sufferings we experience in our own person.
 
A second consolation is: Remember the universality of sorrow. Look around you, behold the vast multitude166 who are suffering like you; remember the countless generations who have suffered in the past, think of the generations to come that will suffer in like manner. Such are some of the consolations of the choruses in the Greek tragedies. Latent perhaps in this mournful view of the facts of existence is another aspect of the matter, namely, the uprising from frustration toward ideal realization. And in so far as this other uplifting view is indeed latent or suggested, the thought of the universality of sorrow has an ennobling effect. On the other hand, without the explication of what may be regarded as implicit in them the consolations of the Greek choruses are inexpressibly saddening.
 
A third and active variant of the former consolation is: Seek to mitigate the sorrow and trouble of thy fellow-sufferers. Appease the passion of thi............