You Hate Someone. They Die. Now What?

They lied. They stole. They left mountains of wreckage in their wake.

They terrorized you. Tricked you. Called you Dweeb or Tubby — once, or for 25 years.

They shattered things you loved. They made you want to vanish.

Then they died.

You'd always half-believed that their death, in a sense, would set you free.

You'd half-imagined hearing of their passing, then suddenly feeling lighter, breathing easier, as if your hatred was an illness and their final heartbeat was the cure.

Why then does it still burn?

Why are you still bound hand-and-foot in white-hot hatredland? Why does its razor-wire still slash?

Because death sometimes makes life seem unfair. It lets bad people slip away unpunished, unrepentant, unreformed. This is why our ancestors — if it isn't real — invented hell.

Also: Thank science.

Strong emotions are hardwired into us. We never stop loving our departed dear ones, right? Hatred also holds fast: Due to the negativity bias, human brains tend to register and retain negative stimuli more quickly and lastingly than good ones.

Our brains learn from pain. Whatever first made us despise that person — trauma, fear, disgust — kindled a fight-or-flight response: Amygdala on high alert; cue stress hormones and the "hate circuit": a feedback loop involving such brain structures as the putamen, located near the thalamus, and a small part of the cerebral cortex called the insula.

We are neurobiologically primed to hate.

Linking that person with that pain, these neural pathways awoke and intensified whenever we saw or even considered him/her/them. Show us a photograph today, tell us you're sorry for our loss — these neural pathways still scream Warning! Danger! Nooooo!

Death deletes nothing. Some harm never heals. Mercy is never mandatory. At a spiritual level, sometimes hating someone feels fiercely required of us: a moral mission by which we proclaim their crimes.

Their flesh has vanished, but its history has not. This is why, personal acquaintanceship aside, we detest long-dead strangers such as Hitler or Pol Pot. Their evil outlives them, crystallized for eternity. Their passing revived no victims, rebuilt no shattered towns. If we want to declare how much we hate Pol Pot or Hitler, we can always find an eager audience. But if we want to vent about someone dead whom we personally knew and hated? Crickets. Truth becomes an echo chamber.

Were we their only victim, the only witness? Is everyone else unwitting, in denial, immune?

Our hatred often makes us hate ourselves — for being "haters," whom society deems ugly, cruel, brutal, uncivilized. For being negative. For staying stuck. For living stubbornly in yesteryear, refusing to let go, grow up, move on, forgive, forget.

We hate ourselves for hugging them, for having pretended to like or even love them, laughing at their jokes. We hate ourselves for being not brave justice-seeking champions but cowards whose sole superpower is that we won't cry.

We hate ourselves for becoming that person's victim in the first place, letting them do whatever it was they did to us, once or a thousand times. We hate ourselves because surely that was our fault? Surely we asked for that?

This is why our ancestors performed rites. This is why they wrote sigils in the sand, then stomped them out. This is why they crafted clay figurines to smash. This is why our ancestors threw things into fires and, alone or together, danced on graves. This is why certain bodies were buried face-down, defiled with charcoal, or denied the sanctity of burial itself. This is why our ancestors inscribed hated names on lead strips, rolled these into cylinders, and flung them into rivers.

This is why.

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