Imagine your favorite thing that you own. For whatever reason, it is the material thing that you most enjoy. When you are having a bad day or a good day, it is always comforting to have and use that thing. You are definitely attached to it. Now imagine it is gone. One day you wake up and it is missing. There is no hope of finding it. Maybe you know exactly what happened to it. you know where it is. But it is completely destroyed. You could replace it with a very similar thing, perhaps an exact replacement. But that new one will never be the original.
I would say that our attachment to others is also material in nature. Our relationships, while deeply personal, spiritual, and meaningful, are necessitated by our physical existence. We do not know anyone for any other reason than that we are all here together sharing this physical existence. When a person dies, the loss is a material loss. And that is what hurts the most about losing a person. The non-material parts of our relationships with people are always with us---those portions of our existence live in our psyches as something more than purely tangible. We can access what is beyond physical about a person without that person being there physically because a part of a person lives in our minds as a perception, an idea. What hurts is the material, physical loss of a person. I will never see my brother again.
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