Human beings are social creatures. As time passes, we build relationships. We build families and communities. We tie ourselves to people through the love we have for them. When we begin to witness the ones we love leave this earthly realm, we navigate death with confusion and fear. We wonder how best to grieve, and we worry about being either too attached or too detached.

Our priorities tend to sit with the relationships that are tangible and of the world. We think mostly of the ones we love who are alive and animated. With them, we experience deep emotional closeness. Around them, our lives revolve.

But what happens when they go?

Guru Teghbahadar Sahib’s words unveil a difficult truth:

When breaths become separate from the body, crying out they say: “ghost, ghost!”
No one keeps the body for half a moment, they drive it out from the house.1.

When there is no life or being or “existence” in the physical form, when we see that the life-force is gone from a person with whom we had a close relationship, we are uninterested in keeping those relationships. We take the body out of the home quickly. Suddenly, the being separated from the body becomes something terrifying. What can be done?

The Guru offers us a gentle shift in perspective:

O being! This world’s creation is like the thirst of a deer; see this, having reflected in the heart.

This world is a mirage.
Let us reflect on this for a moment.

A mirage is a natural phenomenon. And so it is not that the world is false and therefore must be discarded. The Guru tells us, this world is an illusion, and we ought to know this even as we live in it, even as we form relationships in it, even as we lose relationships in it.

A mirage is an illusion that disappears when one gets closer to it. The Guru asks us to get close to the mirage, not to abandon our relationships but to lean in and watch the illusion disappear—to see beyond the illusion, not to run from it.

Let us examine our relationships more closely, and see them for what they really are. We tend to live in a duality that tells us our relationships and remembrance of IkOankar (The One) are opposing—that we cannot connect with the One and also have our “worldly” relationships.

In this duality, in this struggle, Guru Teghbahadar Sahib’s guidance echoes profoundly:

Nanak’s statement: Sing praises of the Nam of IkOankar every day, through which liberation happens.

We can shift our perspectives, and work towards rooting our relationships in the One through Nam (Identification). This is how we are freed from the fear of death—from dichotomies of attachment and detachment.

What if the love we have for people, long after they are in a physical body, is merely a reflection of the love we have for the One? What if we make these relationships themselves acts of Remembrance, Praise, and Identification?
Let us build depth in our relationships, such that they exist beyond the confines of physical presence.
Let us make them vast, such that they transcend time and space, unbound by physical presence, unbound from the body.

Let us continue to remember and love those who have gone.
Let us treat grief as an opportunity for gratitude and remembrance—of the One from Whom we all come, of the One to Whom we all return.

May the Wisdom-Guru guide us!