The question here is…
Do the people most important to you really matter?
Or is it some innate need we have to cling to those closest to us in order to measure the type of person we are in this world.
Consider these scenarios: those that have lost parents as children (or lack stable family structure) or those that have lost parents as adults. I’ve had neither happen, but it certainly seems like the children have above average trouble figuring out their place in this world.
And for the adults that have lost their parents, it looks as if their entire world had been flipped upside down. A parent dying is like a bad earthquake that destroyed foundation of the house they’ve been building on all their life.
Who is right and who is wrong? What is right and what is wrong?
This is the foundation of all of our lives. This is how we define our value and ethical systems. The answers to these questions gives us directions on how to conduct ourselves each day.
Without them, we are hopeless wanderers that might as well flip a coin to make decisions.
The children have to write their own directions. The adults, it’s as if their directions got ripped up and thrown away.
Regarding the children, it’s not that their foundation has cracked, it’s that they are trying to build a house on quicksand.
1 step forward, 3 steps back.
However, I believe anyone, including these children, has the potential to thrust themselves out of their environmental issues beyond their control.
With that said, there’s a lot working against these children’s efforts and they have to find validation from within at a very young age. This is a must for any sort of faith to exist that the path they are on and the things they are doing are the right things to do.
Trusting others probably didn’t go so well when they learned it from the world of strangers and not their parents.
As far as those foundational questions that help each of us write our own unique life directions… the answers are up to you-
the person asking them.
Only you decide who and what is right/wrong, and only you have to live and deal with the consequences of your actions. No matter how important someone is to you, they are not guaranteed in your life.
Then what.
You become lost for a while until something fills the gap and helps you figure out who you are in the world.
Ahh… Relief from not knowing who you are.
If this is true, grief from death is an act of self-interest. But that doesn’t sound right.
There are other factors to how death impacts your life beside how you measure yourself as a person. What I mean is that that self-interest I’m referring to is the craving we all have to find out who we are.
To not know who we are, is to live out each of our days as a helpless wanderer, and it is no way to honor whatever gift life is.
So we search and search until that gap is filled, and we are whole again.
I guess I’m begging the question of whether or not that ordeal is even necessary.
Can I be important enough to myself to be able to measure who I am based on my very own reactions and judgments?
After all, I have judgments and I am an important person in others’ lives. That means I can very well become that gap in someone else’s life on the other side of this argument.
So I am, in effect, the very person I’m trying to impress. I just don’t think of it that way.
The Last Peace 
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