Now back to the issue of whether or not we can call a parent happy if they lived well but then their children had bad lives after the parent was already dead. If we say that it does not matter at all what happens to the children, that seems pretty cold and it is not something that most people would agree with. So we should say something about this, but the problem is that there are so many different kinds of things that can happen in life. We cannot go over all of them. Let us instead talk about things generally speaking and rather not go into details about what if this or that specific thing happened.

In life, some things that happen have a big impact and other things not so much. So it is also, with things that happen to people close to you. Think about how you feel and how you are affected when you watch something happen on-stage during a tragedy versus when a messenger comes and tells about something that happened off-stage. However much there is a difference there, we have to assume there is a much greater difference between how things affect people that are alive and how they affect them when they are dead. We may doubt whether the dead can even be affected at all by good and bad things in the land of the living. Even if we suppose the dead can be affected, it is hard to imagine that it would be enough to make them change from unhappy to happy or the other way around.