Should I go to the funeral of someone who made my life smaller, or does showing up just finish the job?

The Tao offers no sentimentality here, no absolution ceremony, no talk of healing. It offers a parable: the man who wouldn't enter the mill because the millstone had crushed his father carried the grain on his back until his spine bent into the very curve he was avoiding. The Tao Te Ching never names avoidance as neutral — what you refuse to move through, you carry instead, and what you carry long enough begins to carry you. The question isn't really about the funeral. It's about who's been making the decisions in your body since the day they started making your life smaller. Go or don't. But be honest about which choice is still taking orders from them.

“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”

— Zhuangzi

Diogenes didn't petition anyone before he left a room — or entered one. The Cynics had no patience for the elaborate theater of moral deliberation precisely because deliberation is often postponement wearing a toga. Notice what the question is actually doing: it's asking a tradition, a text, a stranger, to authorize a decision you've already made or are too frightened to make alone. The harder question — the one you've dressed this one up to avoid — is whether the life that was made smaller was handed over in installments, and if so, where that accounting goes now that there's no one left to return it to. The grief underneath this question doesn't need a philosophy. It needs honesty, and that's free.

“I am a citizen of the world.”

— Diogenes of Sinope, as recorded by Diogenes Laërtius

Vedanta will not let you stand comfortably in the role of the one who was wronged — not because the wrong wasn't real, but because the one who was wronged is not the deepest thing you are. The Mandukya Upanishad is precise on this point: the witness, the dreamer, and the one dissolved in dreamless sleep are not three selves but one — and none of them is the story of the damage. You walked into this question already dressed as a character: 'someone whose life was made smaller.' Vedanta wants to know who dressed you. The funeral is almost beside the point. The question beneath the question is whether you will attend your own life as the Self, or as that character, all the way to the end.

“The Self is not born, nor does it die at any time.”

— Bhagavad Gita 2.20

Islamic jurisprudence is specific: the janazah prayer is a communal obligation, fard kifayah, a duty distributed across the community so the dead are not abandoned. But the theology behind it is sharper than the law. You are not attending to confirm reconciliation or perform forgiveness. You are attending because you, too, are a creature returning — because standing at a grave with the wound still present in your chest is precisely the posture Islam recognizes as honest before God. The Quran is unambiguous that Allah's knowledge of what was done to you exceeds your own memory of it. The accounting is not yours to complete. You carry only your feet to the prayer, and you let the One who keeps every ledger carry the rest.

“Every soul shall taste death, and you will be paid your full recompense only on the Day of Resurrection.”

— Quran 3:185

Camus does not offer comfort, and he certainly doesn't offer closure — closure is a myth of tidy universes, and Camus never lived in one. What he offers instead is revolt: the act of walking into that room with your eyes fully open, knowing the debt was never paid, will not be paid now, and will not be retroactively settled by your attendance or your absence. That walk, taken without illusion, is not capitulation. It is the only form of dignity available in an indifferent world — the Sisyphean gesture, lucid and undeceived. The universe will issue no receipt. The silence above the casket is the same silence that came before all of this and will remain after. You go, or you don't, and either way the boulder is still yours.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus