This post is mostly personal; it may annoy or dismay some readers. I’m leaving it on LessWrong because it does touch on issues relevant to the community, and also because I have nowhere else to go.

content warning: death, grief, and not-so-rational coping mechanisms

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My grandfather died in December.

He had a stroke several months ago. The weather was getting chilly, so he and my grandmother visited their countryside cottage to prepare the garden for winter. As they were ready to drive back home, grandpa suddenly staggered and fell over. He was brought to hospital quickly, and the surgery was successful, and all the circumstances seemed so favorable, and I was dumb enough to expect a full recovery. And then he got infected with coronavirus while he was still in the hospital ward.

The last time I saw him was before the pandemic. I was going to tell and ask him so many things “when this is all over”, and now I never will. Everything he was and everything he could be, with all his knowledge and memory, is lost irretrievably. "When an elder dies, a library is burnt to the ground", as the proverb says. Except it wasn't just some stupid library, it was my grandpa who used to play chess with me (he always called the queen "dame") and proudly tell everyone who’d listen how well his granddaughter was doing with her studies. I wanted him to live forever, and instead the universe, in its blind indifference, destroyed him, like it had destroyed billions of others before him.

I can’t remember what his body looked like; the thing that lay in the coffin was incomprehensible. It had nothing in common with my grandfather — a joyous, energetic, kind-hearted man who had survived a bomb exploding in his hands when he was a boy and fought two cancers into remission when he grew old. The morticians had done an exceptional job, and the thing was a perfectly executed imitation of an elderly stranger. The hairline was recognizable; otherwise, I could see nothing but a wax figure that was, for some reason, dressed in my grandfather’s suit. So I remained calm, as I knew grandpa wasn’t really in that coffin — or anywhere else.

I never tried suggesting cryonics when I still could. All of my relatives are, to some extent, religious or spiritual, and my grandfather was no exception. I predicted tha...

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