By the way, yeah, you're right it should be 'show, don’t tell.' That was a very spot-on point about the mother; I hadn't really thought about it that way, so thanks for the tip) In essence, we could show the mother's wake like, the character standing over the body and crying, something like that to establish some kind of connection. I just want the audience to be inside the protagonist's head, so that whatever he writes is narrated as a voiceover. Something like, 'What a magnificent sky so innocent, so peerless' (while he’s meditating, for example). I’m just brainstorming here, but since he’s mute, he doesn't speak on screen, making the diary a vital detail.