Eternally Yours,

04/05/2024

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If you think you should go to the funeral, you probably should, even if you didn't know the person directly.

At the reception after my dad's funeral, a woman I didn't recognize came up and introduced herself to me. It turns out that she was the daughter of a dear friend and colleague of my dad's from decades earlier.

I had never met the woman, or her father, although when she told me his name, I knew exactly who he was. I had grown up hearing stories about him.

The woman's father had died 20 years earlier, but she'd seen the obituary, and recognized my dad's name the same way I recognized her father's. She took the afternoon off work, and came to my dad's funeral, on her father's behalf, to honour the depth of the friendship between these two men, both now dead.

We hugged each other and cried. We cried for fathers, for friendship, and for the village-making beauty of a funeral.

Why her coming mattered to me is almost impossible to put into words. It's a truth that lives in the realm of symbolic soul reality, not logical, linear, material reality. That's the heart-and-soul part of dying, the part that's made real by participation in ritual.

07/28/2023

🍃Originally Published November 20, 2018
Updated July 11, 2023

Get end-of-life caregiving assistance for patients and families

07/22/2022

When love transcends beliefs: I'm An Atheist And I Prayed With My Grandma On Her Deathbed.

I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in the power of petitionary prayer, but that doesn’t mean I’d never pray. In fact, a few years ago, I stood next to my grandma as she was dying in a hospital bed, my hands clasped in prayer.

Some of you might remember that my grandmother was a huge inspiration to me as a kid. She was compassionate, artistic, and a hard worker. A former librarian, my grandma valued reading and crafted extensively. She was also a fundamentalist Christian who believed every single word of the Holy Bible.

I had a close – yet complicated – relationship with my grandma. She was my first introduction to church. She’s also the reason I became obsessed with religion, and then ultimately made it one of my majors in college. In fact, she’s even the reason I wrote Disproving Christianity. I had been obsessed with debunking biblical literalism ever since she said the Bible was inerrant years earlier.

Several years after the book published, I got the call that everyone with a grandmother fears the most. She was dying, and I didn’t have long to tell her goodbye. I was in college at the time in Santa Barbara, but I emailed my professors and took off to the hospital in Northern California where she would ultimately take her last breath.

When I arrived, everyone in the family was gathered around her hospital bed. But as I walked into the room, they all vacated and allowed me to be alone with the woman who raised me for much of my childhood. She was in tears, and so was I. She had one simple request. Pray with her.

Now a lot of non-believers and secular activists might have taken a stand against prayer right then. Instead, I did what any good person would do: I held her hand and prayed.

About an hour later, she had passed away. That was my last interaction with my grandma, and I don’t regret a thing. It wasn’t about gods or prayer for me – it was about making my grandma feel comfortable in her final moments.

Stay Reasonable,

————

This photo was taken about 8 years ago but
decided to share his story now.

07/17/2022

07/09/2022

“The Afterlife” by Billy Collins

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(And some just smile, forever on)