It is remarkable how lonely it can feel as an atheist at a funeral in a religious setting. The sense of the Christian god as a comforting presence - even as a fellow griever - that seems to link the mourners together, and to allow them to feel the comfort of community, was absent for me today. I don't take comfort in knowing my friend is "an angel" now - that he is "with His Lord Jesus Christ." It could be seen as a lovely idea, if one divorces it from all the nasty things that attend that god. The idea that he was so wonderful God couldn't wait to have his company in Heaven is a silly one, but I can see how appealing it is to his family and friends who believe in that sort of thing, because it lends some semblance of structure or reason to horrible, tragic loss. It makes bearable the unbearable.
Grieving doesn't inspire sudden belief just because some kind of comfort feels so necessary, or make the ridiculous credible, so I felt alone in a group of 400 mourners, who all miss this friend terribly, and believe that he is smiling down on them from Heaven. There was community in the grief, and I was part of that, but also felt keenly separate because I cannot reclaim the belief I had a long time ago that people die and go to Heaven, and we all reunite after death in the loveliest place imaginable. I don't want that belief back and could not find it even if I did, but it's interesting to me that while grieving him, I think I am also - and perhaps more distinctly - grieving the loss of the ability to believe that death is not the end of relationships. Death is certainly a transformation, but not the kind religion asserts. We transition into our component parts, become a different kind of piece of the physical universe, but the mind? That's gone, not to be reclaimed. That makes death a horrific prospect - not for the one dying, but for those left living and grieving.
