“When the people we love leave us, where does the love go?”

In this deeply personal and professional exploration, Shruti Jain invites us to reimagine death not as an end, but as a threshold. Drawing from her own journey through the loss of her parents and her work as an existential psychotherapist and death doula, this dissertation weaves together the profound wisdom of existential philosophy with the lived experience of grief.

Challenging the traditional narrative of “letting go,” this work explores the concept of continuing bonds—how our relationships with the departed can evolve, deepen, and continue to guide us. Through the lenses of Heidegger, Sartre, and Frankl, combined with spiritual insights, it offers a compassionate roadmap for finding light when the world goes dark.

This is an inquiry into the human heart’s capacity to find meaning in mortality and to discover that even in the face of death, love remains the most enduring truth of all.