That said, it gives me pause, to come up for air from the ocean under which I live, relatively alone. Reading obituary blogs and messages of bereavement is also awful, but kind of disconcerting. Occasionally it is infuriating.
I believe the world has exhausted the ways to say, for example, "Stevie's death has made me think a lot more about life."..."sitting in church that day, watching Jim's funeral really put things in perspective."...etc, etc.
First of all, I honor grief in all forms, and always encourage the health and mindfulness that these types of thoughts lead to and include.
And I also wonder what you're doing the rest of the time. I think about death and dying, life etc. it's not terribly deep and doesn't feel like lucidity. It's understandable why I do it now, cause I'm a chaplain for hospice. I say goodbye to 2 people a week, on average. I get called to visit folks that are either very close to dying or have already passed; and I've finally experienced one of my more morbid goals in life which is to witness someone pass.
But the truth is I've been thinking about this all my adult life. In high school, I took one of those vocational surveys, and I was told I should be a funeral director. Who tells a fifteen year old that?
This is more of a weird confession than a rant. But I don't know if it's Hollywood or what that tells us we need to have powerful lucid reflections around death. We probably need to work harder everyday to accept the nature of reality and of a consistent experience of loss, rather than trying to sound profound as a way of coping with tragic loss.
