Parallel Vol. 4 [LEGACY EDITION]

Parallel Vol.4

Grief.

What is Grief? How do we measure grief? What is it's importance in our lives?

I remember a friend once told me that grief is the heavy feeling you get in the pit of your stomach, or in the depths of your heart when you lose someone you love. It is that crushing depression which comes when denial fails to comfort our pain. I often wondered why humans possessed such an emotion. Was there any particular reason it persisted past the ages? Does it serve a particular purpose? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves yet.

Measuring grief, according to several books turned out to be the easiest part actually. Grief, like hate, is entirely dependent on Love. The amount of grief and hatred we feel is directly proportional to the amount of Love we felt for something or someone taken away from us. To put it in simpler terms, the more love we have for something/someone, the greater the grief we experience over its loss, and the greater the hatred we feel for whoever was responsible for taking it away from us. Of course, this brings up the question of whether the world would be a better without an emotion like love. It makes one wonder what society would be like if we were all fiercely logical creatures, without any reason to hate each other. Well, that's a discussion for another day.

Now onto the importance of grief, a concept I can't just wrap my head around. Some people liken the loss of a person to a heavy load clogging up space in our heart. They say if we do not grieve, we would not be able to free up that space in our heart, and in some cases, can lead to us not having enough space for other people. Well, I don't know how true that is, and quite frankly I don't give a damn. I'm more interested in why that emotion still persists in the human system. 

Is it like a family thing? Since we evolved to be pseudo pack-animals that lived in small units, did we need an emotion like grief so we could better appreciate the limited workforce we had at the time and better increase our chance of populating the earth? But then again, even animals who are supposed to supposedly follow the law of "Survival of the Fittest," also experience grief when their mates or children pass away. 

Ah, whatever, I don't care. The real question I want to ask is this: If there is a human who does not feel grief; does not feel pain when someone close to him dies; can look on at the corpse of his parents without a ripple in his heart. If there is such a person, can he still be considered human? Even beasts feel something when family members pass on. If there was a human who felt nothing, what would he be?

...What would I be?

...What exactly am I supposed to be?