Grief and Nonbelief: A Few Thoughts

 When my mother died, I took it hard. As an atheist, I harbored no illusions of a future reunion in some idyllic afterlife. She was dead and I was never going to see her again. Ever. No more weekend phone calls. No more dinners at Big Boy as she downed endless cups of coffee. No more discussing politics or the news of the day. No more telling her of the latest achievements of her grandchildren, whom she adored. No more anything.

My religious family members, however, spoke of her awakening into eternal life and of meeting her again when they themselves exited this mortal plane.

I can’t truly say I exactly envied the comfort their belief gave them, but it did seem they were having an easier time dealing with her death than I was. In fact, I seemed to be the only one to even USE the term “death”. For them, she had “passed on” or “gone to be with the Lord” or some such euphemism.

For me, she was dead. For them, she was… in some sense, at least… eternally alive.

And so, I grieved. And it was very difficult. The void her loss had left in my life was real and painful. And I faced it directly, without consoling thoughts of heaven or Jesus or other spiritual palliatives.

And over time, I noticed something. After going about my life facing the loss honestly and directly, I found I had accepted the fact of her death. I still missed her, to be sure, but in my mind the happy memories I had of her more than compensated for the pain. She was gone, but I was still alive and ready to embrace that life and all it had to offer. I was ready to enjoy this existence again without the lingering shadow of sorrow. And honestly, that’s what my mom would have wanted. I had borne the pain of grief and I had healed.

And as even more time went by, I noticed something else. The same people who so confidently spoke of my mom’s “eternal life” were still having difficulty dealing with her death. They had yet to move on. They had yet to deal with the fact she was no longer around. In some sense, it seemed to me that in denying the fact she had really died, they had not yet truly and fully grieved.

Then one day, I was doing a deep dive into some Bob Dylan albums. One of the albums I was listening to was “Saved”, from Dylan’s born-again Christian period. Some lyrics on the title track caught my attention:

“I was blinded by the devil
Born already ruined
Stone-cold dead
As I stepped out of the womb”

Those words hit me like a frying pan to the face. It was a moment of profound clarity. Here was Dylan, proclaiming Christian doctrine as he understood it, saying that birth – the supreme miracle of new life – was actually death.

It suddenly all made sense to me!

By their own admission, in Christian doctrine, birth is actually death but somehow death is eternal life!

How the hell can Christianity help people sort out issues of life and death when they have those concepts completely ass-backwards?!?

For me, birth is life’s beginning and death is its end. It ain’t that difficult!

It seemed to me that religion helped people cope better in the short term, but that in the long term, I was dealing with things far better.

In an admittedly strange way of framing things, I felt that I was able to more on because in a sense I gave my mom “permission to be dead”.

She didn’t have to live forever in order for her life to have had meaning. And I didn’t have to believe she was alive in order to find happiness in her memories.

She was born, she was alive, and she died.

She died, I grieved, and I healed.

And that’s good enough for me.