busyI don't think these are really the healthiest examples. They are illuminating in some ways, though.
I'd like to point out that "grief" and "despair" are two very different things, that just happen to run together sometimes. Despair seems to come when someone's life depended very strongly on a person or role now lost, with little or nothing else in the way of support network. So if we want to minimize despair, we need to make sure that people have large families (whether by birth, marriage, or choice) and robust community support. Bereaved people should not be pestered with mundane tasks while they're trying to tie off the cut end of a relationship before their soul bleeds to death. Since modern society is bad at meeting the needs of those bereaved, it should be no surprised that many of them despair.
There are some healthier perspectives.
* Some cultures don't draw the same sharp line between life and death that American culture does. Many African cultures practice ancestor worship and view death rather like graduation: you go to join the spiritual workforce of the divine you've been following all along. Mexicans picnic in cemeteries so the whole family can be together.
* Beliefs about the afterlife can affect grief in other ways too. If you think of life as eternal, and this world as one adventure among many, then the parting is less absolute and the grief less crushing. Sure it's upsetting when you and your loved ones are not in the same dimension at the same time, but it's a lot more tolerable when you have a sense that you have been before and will be again. So the way you deal with it changes because of that, and it becomes more like storing up memories to tell someone at the end of a long trip when you get back together. If you actually have memories of other lives, that helps even more.
* Grief can be viewed as the natural manifestation of a healthy relationship at its parting point. Understand it, prepare for it, and it will more likely function as a natural life event than a disaster. If people are unprepared, it's more prone to suffer complications. In this it is much like birth.
* A person cannot be replaced, but in a healthy community, their role in someone's life often can be. A death can leave a big hole behind, and it's usually necessary to divide the components among different people, often including new friends. If John's brother dies, then John may need to find a new fishing companion, a new roller-coaster rider, and a new horror book fan. Those are all things that can be done by a wide range of people, which helps fill the gap. John may also pick up a whole different hobby if one proves impossible to replace or is too painful to revisit at the time.