The Dance of Death and Inheritance

Death was once a simple matter, at least for those who were left behind. When you lost someone, you were sad. Maybe a lot, perhaps only a little. You mourned the departed or you didn’t. Death was purely a loss, serious or trivial. You had to get over it and get on with your life, and leave the dead behind.

Death was, we can safely assume, a recurrent feature of our ancestral environment. We are no doubt adapted to it. Our ancestors were not surprised when it arrived. Senescence, as scientists have noted, is a design feature of life, not one of S.J.Gould’s spandrels. Women bore many offspring and lost a goodly number of them, without being undone by their grief. Life, for hunters and gatherers, was often fatal. Death was familiar, if unappealing.

Since then, however, death often comes with a seductive companion, a floozy called inheritance, who muddles the emotional response to her somber partner. The survivors, gathered to mourn the departed, often find themselves thinking about her instead. They may even have been lusting after her for some time. Can they contemplate their loss in peace, untroubled by the imminence of gain? Or does their internal dialogue spin around something like this:

“She was a wonderful woman, I’ll miss her terribly, we can sure use the money, we’re lucky he was so successful, is there something wrong with me, am I bad to feel this way?"

Can Prince Charles help wondering, “How long must I wait?”

The juxtaposition of loss and gain creates a jumble of thoughts and feelings—guilt, greed, shame, anticipation, and fear. All wrapped up together like that, it’s a package that evolution has not prepared us to deal with.

The circumstance creates the sin. The human emotional system, so efficient at dealing with death alone, splinters when inheritance joins the funeral, shifting thoughts from the lost loved one to the all-too-present self.