Grief

Last week the father of a friend of mine passed away. It was quite sudden and left all who knew him in something of a state of shock, especially my friend. As is custom I attended the wake and offered my very sincere condolences to my friend during a extremely difficult time. His father was a lovely person and although I did not know the man well I along with everyone else will miss him. This brings me to my point du jour. What do I as an Atheist say to someone who has just lost a loved one.

This to me seems a more pressing issue than what to say to the dying. They are in a position to face death and when it comes they are no longer in a position to care. Those left behind however find themselves with a deep sense of loss and without the hope of an afterlife to sustain them I find myself wondering what to say as an Atheist or in turn to an Atheist who has lost a loved one. As I thought over the matter I tried to think of the losses in my life, and what words gave me solace. I never was terribly faithful so promises of heavenly reunion never held much water. As I thought about it I came up with a couple of things that have granted me some perspective in times of trouble.

The first thing is somewhat obvious, and is pretty universal. We need to be grateful for the time we had with the dearly departed. Not grateful to some god or heavenly overlord, but just grateful that we had the opportunity to know the person who has died. However much they enriched our lives it is vital to know that the pain we feel will fade, while that gift of their companionship will not. When the funeral is over and the mourning is done those memories, joyful or painful, will be what remain.

The second thing that struck me came when I read a quote from a famous physicist , Lawrence Krauss,as retweeted by of all people Miley Cyrus. To quote: “You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the things that matter for evolution) weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in stars. So forget Jesus. Stars died so you can live.” I think that reason I find solace in this is it shows us our true place in universe. We are nothing more than the products of collapsing bits of stars and matter that have been around since the beginning of the universe. This is true whether we are alive or dead. The idea that something has changed when we die is a mere perceptive shift. A redistribution of energy and matter. Nothing of the substance that made up the one we loved has ceased to be. It is only the collaboration that has ended. Like actors parting ways after the final bow of the last show. The parts have simply moved onto other sums.

The last thing I have found some semblance of solace in is the oddness of time in a cosmological sense. I should note that I have a very superficial understanding of this and if I am completely off base I welcome being told so. Time is a dimension. As a dimension it exists as a giant expanse in which we each have a designated size. The thing is like other dimensions it is not necessarily linear. It all exists all at once and it is only our memory that leads it to be linear. This entire blog could be written in moments that lie on opposite ends of my existence, but my memory of them lines them up next to each other in my head. The upshot of this is while you may feel that your loved one has passed on, those moments you treasure and miss may still be yet to happen and it is only something as trivial and the nuances of how we feel time pass that hide that fact from you.

I don't know if this will help anyone but me. I hope it will. In times of loss it is easy to find ourselves wishing for a higher purpose or some ethereal plane in which we can reunite with those gone before us. I would never be so cruel as to tell a believer who is grieving that they are deluded. At the same time the need to comfort is no less in those who don't believe and my hope is that some of what I've written here might help to provide that solace.