The traditional hierarchy of authority with regards to family and relatives is skewed towards elders having all the power and influence over who does what with an arbitrary why reason that's basically borders around "because that's how things are done!"
The individual just has to follow what's been decreed without understanding the actual reasoning behind the directive.
In a good way, this could be interpreted as the collective mind is concentrated on the top based on amount of time lived and experiences gained, which in my view best describes how older people indirectly tell you that they know better. The good part is really what comes from genuine wisdom, i.e lessons learned through real struggle and perspective that only decades can provide.
In a not so good way, I'd say a bubble of sorts exists where those family/relatives who live outside the bubble can't express divergent views without being seen as threats to the established order, and those who live inside this bubble think that those who live outside the bubble are disobedient ungrateful empty vessels who have no values of respect, tradition, or family loyalty.
Gladly, I will let myself be perceived in the latter category without being explicitly labeled as such.
We recently had my grandmother's brother(father's side) passed away. I personally don't know much about him and mostly heard of him every now and then from close relatives who sometimes speak of him mid-sentence as an example to explain a point.
From what I've gathered, this person didn't build a family of his own and lived the kind of ascetic/nomadic lifestyle. Kind of because he lived with people at one specific place but also had a detached dynamic of not always being around in that specific place and goes on journeys seeking something, or perhaps avoiding something, I'm not entirely sure.
I don't remember ever seeing him in my conscious existence, though my mother was quite fond of him back then while I was a child growing up and said he once visited and they chatted about life and other topics and kept in touch via phone calls.
I guess somehow they drifted apart with life taking a different direction for both. Now, given his recent passing, I've noticed this projection of how to feel/think about him from those who've broadly interacted with him to those who haven't interacted with him but still part of the same extended family network.
I know it seems a normal thing to do given the collective grieving process.
Being aware of the projection in real time really does create this uncanny dissonance, at least for me. It's like I'm being programmed to mourn someone I never knew and feel a prescribed emotion instead of whatever authentic feeling, or lack thereof, actually exists within me.
On a backdrop about the whole situation being ironic. Here was a man who apparently chose to live outside the bubble of sorts I mentioned earlier. And yet, in death, the family collective tries to pull him back into the fold and rewrite his narrative in a way that makes sense within their framework.
I'll say for myself it was an insightful experience to be aware of this dynamic around shared emotions as a theme for specific situations and those like me not being able to digest the menu of emotions we never ordered.
On the flip side, I do acknowledge the comfort others find in collective mourning. And I pray they find peace in their memories of him and him also finding peace wherever he is, finally free from anyone's narrative, including this one.
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