My grandfather died last year. It was the first loss in my lifetime that had occurred to a family member I saw somewhat frequently. I wouldn't say I was especially emotionally close to him in a really significant way; his mental state was kind of fuzzy by the time I got to an age where that kind of relationship might really foster. Still, he was a close family member.

I personally tried to use the time to grow. I remember at his funeral I was crying when I remembered this passage from Jiddu Krishnamurti's book 'Freedom From the Known.' It can seem kind of cold at first, but try to see past the bluntness of it all:

When you lose someone you love you shed tears - are your tears for yourself or for the one who is dead? Are you crying for yourself or for another? Have you ever cried for another? Have you ever cried for your son who is killed on the battlefield? You have cried, but do those tears come out of self-pity or have you cried because a human being has been killed? If you cry out of self-pity your tears have no meaning because you are concerned about yourself. If you are crying because you are bereft of one in whom you have invested a great deal of affection, it was not really affection. When you cry for your brother who dies cry for him. It is very easy to cry for yourself because he is gone. Apparently you are crying because your heart is touched, but it is not touched for him, it is only touched by self- pity and self-pity makes you hard, encloses you, makes you dull and stupid.

When you cry for yourself, is it love - crying because you are lonely, because you have been left, because you are no longer powerful - complaining of your lot, your environment - always you in tears? If you understand this, which means to come in contact with it as directly as you would touch a tree or a pillar or a hand, then you will see that sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time. I had my brother three years ago, now he is dead, now I am lonely, aching, there is no one to whom I can look for comfort or companionship, and it brings tears to my eyes. You can see all this happening inside yourself if you watch it. You can see it fully, completely, in one glance, not take analytical time over it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shoddy little thing called `me', my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow. Sorrow and love cannot go together

So I stopped trying to fight back the tears or imagine I was somewhere else and instead, I meditated. I stopped resisting the feelings and sought to let them be free and was curious of them. What did actually feel like? Where were they coming from? How was I meeting them? And in that moment everything became a little easier. I felt connection with the events going on around me instead of the resistance I had felt before and I felt more at peace with it all. The whole process became easier. That obviously doesn't mean that everything became happy, it was of course still a somber affair, I was just more accepting of it. It helped me see some of beauty in the ephemeral nature of life.

And then we all got really drunk at the reception and had a great time in his honour. There was never an end to his insistence that we have a drink.