As a Buddhist I should know better, know that life and death are just man made concepts, all part of the wheel and such...and i think the Roman Catholic Church is the world's biggest cult / mafia. ..So why should I be mourning the death of the head of it?
Yet I've had tears in my eyes several times this week, watching the coverage of the funeral. I liked the man even if I detested his message...maybe it's just that he was in so long, part of my youth gone, something like that...every man's death diminshes me...wish i could feel that way more often...and change scares me, though again I know that change is the onlty constant in this world...

anyway, has anyone else ever done this, mourn the end of someone or something that you didnt even know you cared about?
or am i just an emotional, sentimental fool?

I have. when the bonfire collapsed here at Texas A&M killing 12 students in 1999 I cried for long periods afterwards. I didn't know any of the kids, and I guess it was the loss of those so young and in the prime of life that bothered me.

I was working on drainage rehab project for the city and took a sledge hammer to the parking lot we were going to dig up. I was in a ditch so the asphault was about waist high. The crew leader asked me to stop because we would use a backhoe to dig it up. I just looked at him and went back to smashing the asphault using every bit of anger I had in me. I wasn't wearing gloves and went at it until I could lift the sledge and the crew leader took it from me.

As to the Pope, I didn't feel anything.

I hear you Buddy. I didn't cry at my own Grandmas' funerals, but I cried when Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy Jr. and his mother, Captain Kangaroo, and Mr. Roger's died. I got to meet "The Captain", Bob Keeshan, at a book signing a few years before he died, and had my picture taken with him. I'm still a kid at heart. Yes, we mourn because we are losing something familiar to us, even though we don't know them.

While my husband is Catholic, I'm not, so the Pope's death had no significance, no meaning, no sorrow for me. In fact, I felt a little guilty that it didn't. Instead, I pondered on where all those people, went to the bathroom! Were there port-a-johns in St. Peter's Square?