I feel very sad, very often, and very little remedies the sadness.
I've started writing this thing so many times, and discarded so many drafts. If I took all the words I've written and deleted since December 7th 2013 and put them together, I'd win NaNoWriMo. Sometimes what I wrote was eloquent, but most of the time it was impenetrable garbage that rambled on way past the point where it stopped making sense. Sometimes what I wrote was angry, and mostly it was angry at people who had nothing to do with what I was angry about. Sometimes it had a lot of science in it. Sometimes it used a lot of metaphors. Sometimes it included a lot of fandom references. Sometimes it had pictures, and sometimes they were pictures that I drew (poorly). Sometimes I was bitter. Sometimes I wrote while I was sober, sometimes I wrote while I was drunk, and sometimes I wrote while I was crying and couldn't stop.
Mostly, all the things I wrote were just different ways of saying the same thing: My mom died. I feel very sad, very often, and there are very few things that remedy the sadness. Writing isn't one of them.
But I'm writing anyway, because, I don't know, it's what you do. It's what my dad does. It's marginally easier than talking. It reassures people that you're not coping with a loved one's death by drinking a lot and thinking about suicide. Maybe it helps you sort out your thoughts. Maybe somebody else reads it during their time of grieving, and it makes them feel better, or at least less alone.
Sorry, other grieving people, I don't think this is going to help you. When my mom died, it seems like she bequeathed her difficulty with writing to me-- seriously, she would agonize for hours over an email announcement for a tag sale. She never understood how my dad and I could just write things and make them clever without trying. Which isn't to say she wasn't clever-- I will never, as long as I live and as many improv classes as I take, be as effortlessly funny and likeable as she could be when talking to people. She was... she was so great. I don't even know how to explain it. I don't want to have to explain it.
Every time I have to tell someone that my mom died, I want to say, "but she's not like what you're thinking about," because she's nothing like the archetypal mom-who-dies. She didn't pull me to her bedside and smile beatifically and wipe away my tears before imparting some gem of dying-person wisdom that would motivate me in my quest after her passing. If anything, I was the supporting character in her story, and now that she's dead, my life feels like it's lost some central meaning that I didn't even know existed until I felt its absence. Everything takes more effort than it should now. Getting out of bed, feeding myself, talking to people, reading books, going for walks, it all feels like pantomime. I don't know why I'm doing any of it.
My mom's last intelligible words to me were, "Hey Emma- what does the fox say?" She shouted it at me as my brother and I were leaving the hospital on her orders. She was always telling us to leave-- politely, but firmly, often with suggestions to "go see a movie or something." She didn't like people watching her be sick; being sick was annoying enough without an audience. It was very difficult for her to breathe, much less speak or carry on a conversation, so the effort she put in to shouting an entire sentence at me must have been considerable. She worked so hard to say something to me that would make me laugh. We showed that video to my dad and my brother one night when we were all having dinner together, and we laughed so much, and we had so much fun together, and we can't have fun together anymore, and the happy memories make me saddest of all because we don't get to make more of them. I've heard my mother's voice for the last time. It doesn't exist anymore.
Atheists aren't supposed to have misgivings. We're supposed to be self-righteous jerks who ridicule the sheeple who need their invisible sky-friend to make sense of the world for them. I know how godless grieving works: I should cherish the memories I made with my mom, and feel grateful for the time we spent together, and honor her memory by living the best life I can with the time I have left. I'm supposed to move forward with a heavy heart, but also with a renewed sense of purpose. I'm not supposed to get fuzzy and teary-eyed thinking about pearly gates and reuniting with her in some shiny-fancy city in the clouds. That's ridiculous and I should laugh at people who wish for it. It's not supposed to be the thing I want more than I've ever wanted anything in my life.
My mother's death wasn't part of a cosmic plan, nor was it a catastrophic deviation from one. There was no reason she had to die, just as there would have been no reason she had to live-- the body works as well as it can, and we help it along with doctors and medicine when it needs it, but sometimes cell replication spirals out of control and life ends. This certainly wasn't part of her plans-- she was in the middle of a major website overhaul for her company, she had just adopted a dog, she had auditioned for Jeopardy and was waiting to be invited on to the show-- it wasn't a good stopping point. In the last few days, she kept exclaiming "Oh God!" Not in a wailing, "woe is me" sort of way, or in actual prayer, but in disbelief. It sounded like, every few minutes or so, the reality of the situation would sneak up on her, and because she didn't have enough breath to shout "Are you serious? Cancer? Now? Are you fucking kidding me?", all she could say was, "Oh God!"
My mom's death was natural, but that doesn't mean it was good. Rattlesnake bites and volcanic eruptions are natural too. Human consciousness is a fascinating accident, but the world in which it exists doesn't necessarily cater to its needs. There's no guarantee that all of our experiences, emotions, and relationships will come together to form a cohesive, satisfying narrative--there's no guarantee that the pain will be worth it, or that we'll get as much out of life as what we put into it. Obviously, we're not physically able to withstand every experience that the world can throw at us. Who's to say that we're psychologically equipped to deal with all of life's tragedies, even the natural ones? My mother's death was natural. Everyone I know has either experienced their mother's death, or will experience it, or will die before they get the opportunity. This pain is universal. That doesn't make me feel better about the pain--it just makes me feel worse about the human experience. What if, taken as a whole, it's not actually good?
It took a long time before I went to the library and checked out A Grief Observed. The first date stamped in the back of it was from the year before I was born; it felt like it had been waiting for me. Every fear and doubt and irrational thought that I'd struggled to put into words, Lewis described more perfectly than I could have ever hoped to. It spoke to me. It didn't tell me everything I wanted to hear, and it didn't comfort me, and it didn't try. It's been the only thing that even remotely helped, and I don't know what to make of that. So much of it is inapplicable to me.
If I could pick up my faith where I left off, I would. But you can't just "undo" the conclusion that no evidence supports the persistence of consciousness following the destruction of the body. Once you've stared at the optical illusion long enough to realize it's a picture of a sailboat, you can't look at it again and not see the sailboat. I want my mom to still exist, somewhere, somehow. I know that what I want is impossible, and that wishing for it is childish, and that wishing I had faith like a child won't make it so. Humans end. Humans are hard-wired to not want to end. It's not a system that's designed to work. It's not a system that's designed. A godless universe is the right answer, but I can't help wondering if I would be happier not knowing that.
I feel very sad, very often, and very little remedies the sadness.
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