The separation from friends and family incur feelings of loneliness and alienation but there is no more complete feeling of loneliness and separation than the one that we experience on the occasion of the death of a loved one. The strange thing that few of us are willing to admit to is that we are, in at least some sense, creating this condition for ourselves. The other half of the darkness comes from our own fear that maybe all of our experiences ends for us at the moment of death. This fear is absolutely unfounded. The basis of all religious thought is the firm belief that we experience some form of existence after the physical experience that we call death.
Religion is merely the manifestation of an inkling that all humans, at all times, have had.
For the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, Birth in the Pure Land, or the Enlightenment experience itself, is not an ending at all. Rather, it is the beginning of a whole new life of guiding others to the same experience that we have had. Sometimes it feels like they are very far away, I guess because they are. When this feeling gets really dark and depressing, I say the Nembutsu and think that even in the very worst of possibilities, the members of my family and I will be born into the same place called the Pure Land. We are never really alone, even though we may feel intensely lonely.