The following post is not meant to offend anyone, I respect everyone's personal beliefs, these just happen to be mine.  Please don't take offense, that is not my purpose.

The conundrum of how the level of grief that I and many of us here feel relates to any evolutionary purpose has been on my mind.   Homo Sapiens have been around about 200,000 years, of that time period the vast majority was spent in the paleolithic era, where humans lived in small groups subsisting by hunting and gathering.  The group size was on average believed to be between 30 and 50 individuals.  

These small groups spent their entire lives together, 24 hours a day, everyday.  I believe they probably knew each member of their group as well as many of us knew our loved one.  The question is what purpose does grief have in this context?  I think it actually served as a bonding experience.  Assuming each member shares a relatively equal and significant amount of grief, the loss would drive the bonds of remaining members to become even stronger, by sharing the loss and comforting each other as long as needed.  

In the long run, those groups with the strongest bonds would be those that survived and dominated the plains of Africa and beyond.  And since we are the progeny of the successful hunter gatherers, we are plagued with the strong grief reaction.  Unfortunately most of us lack the extremely close bond of another 30 or 50 people to help us get through the process.  The gathering for the funeral services can hardly be considered equivalent.  Perhaps that is why it hits so much harder after the first hectic week or so and no doubt why we seek each other out here.

Right now, I really think modern western civilization is more of a curse than a blessing.

I had some calmness and clarity this evening,  and writing this post occupied my mind for a while.