When a parent loseth a promising child, a child loseth a loving parent, or when death deprives us of any near relation, it is a speaking and trying providence; and we have much need of grace and counsel from God to conduct aright under it. Let us observed these advices:

It is necessary in such a case that we have a tender sense and feeling of God’s afflicting hand. There are two extremes which we must equally avoid, namely to make light of the death of relations, and to be excessively grieved on that account. God will have us neither to despise his rod, nor to faint under it. Heb. 12:5. God is displeased with those who are stupid and insensible under such afflictions. Hence he complains of such: “I have smitten them, but they have not grieved.” Jer. 5:3. God will have us feel his hand, inquire into the meaning of the rod, and search for those sins that have provoked God to smite us. It is a sign of a selfish and unchristian spirit to be unconcerned for the death of friends, and much more is it so in those children who have a secret satisfaction in the death of parents because of worldly riches or liberty, which they get thereby. God often follows this wicked temper with his heavy judgments even in this life.

Consider that God is calling you by the death of others, to keep up lively and lasting impressions of death and eternity upon your own spirits. God knoweth how advantageous it would be for men to do so, and therefore he sets frequent spectacles of mortality before their eyes for this end. But such is the corruption and earthliness of our minds, that we soon forget the thoughts of death. When we see our friends in the pangs of death, or laid in the grave, it strikes us with some fear and concern, to think that one day this will be our own case; but no sooner is the dead interred, and the grave filled up again than all these serious thoughts begin to vanish, and men return to their sins and pleasures as before. And what folly is this! Should not men always keep alive the serious of death and a future state? Are we not always alike mortal? Are we not liable to death’s arrest at other times, as when examples are before our eyes?
–John Willison, The Afflicted Man’s companion.

This video about the late great Michael Jackson makes the point of the above quote very well.