Before anyone asks, this thread has nothing to do with the thread about my wife’s job, to which I shall not link because of its irrelevance. The thread is, rather, inspired by a remark in this post:
I don’t wish to start a debate on the relative merits of religion and atheism as a coping mechanism for dealing with grief or trauma–hence my choice of forum. What I’d like instead is to see how non-believing Dopers deal with such things without the help (or crutch, depending on your POV) of religious faith.
I’ll start with myself. When my mother died last year, I was alone among my siblings in not believing that I’d see her in Heaven. But (as I think i wrote about here) I did find comfort in the notion that her body would decay: that in time she would be part of soil and worms and grass and flowers and birds (not to mention bird-eating cats). Though I didn’t and don’t believe in personal immortality, I found that notion much more appealing.
I don’t feel a need to look to lost loved ones’ hypothetical infinite futures. I take comfort and solace in keeping their memories alive in my heart.
I figure my life has been blessed with their company, and if there’s spiritual immortality, it’s to be found in the hearts of those who we’ve touched in our lives. As for corporeal remains, I’ve given NajaHusband clear instructions to just dig a hole and plant me under some lilies somewhere wild on our own land. The idea of embalming and caskets makes me a little ill. Just… as you said, let me be part of the earth from which I came.
The worst tragedy in my life (so far) is when my 15-year old nephew died of leukemia, so that’s the only frame of reference I have to go on. Beyond the mourning, my main take-away was to make the most out of the life I’ve been given.
Then there’s the realization that whatever shit I’m enduring is easily dwarfed by the horror that some people in war-torn or impovershed nations deal with on a regular basis.
I’m not religious in any way and don’t find the idea of Heaven perticularly comforting.
We (Unclviny and I) had our sister cremated and sprinkled her in a river recently. I felt like I was returning her to ‘the mix’ and know that’s something she wanted.
I’m still flopping around in the various grief stages so I’m still adjusting to the fact that she’s completely unavailable. How that sucks.
(1) how do you cope with fear of your own death and the thought you will become nothing?
Agreed. It is natural to fear death no matter what your religious views - but as I say to my son (who was born in 1998) “How do you feel about the year, say … 1955? Does that hurt? No? Well, you did not exist then, and neither did I. Death will be like 1955. It won’t involve any pain or fear for us.”
(2) how do you cope with loss in your life, such as the death of a loved one?
Agreed, I am a big fan of the “all part of the great circle of life” approach.
I’m not sure where I am on the “believer-non-believer” scale, but to me, that’s completely secondary to the fact that I don’t personally need to sort it out and decide. Maybe I believe, maybe I don’t, but I have more important things to do with my life than wrestle with that question. I’m perfectly fine without knowing. So I’m agnostic? Sort of, I suppose.
And to answer the real question…family, friends, the support of other human beings. Connections with people whom I can see and feel and talk to are far more comforting to me than connections with supernatural beings that, for all intents and purposes, are all inside my head.
Remembering.
Remembering the good times and the bad. Remembering goals accomplished and goals yet to be completed. Remembering likes, dislikes, loves, hates, ambitions. Remembering the sinner and the saint. Remembering stories told.
Remembering that life is eternal until it is not, and remembering to create my own memories to pass on.
By accepting that death is natural, mourning the loss in my life, being there for others & letting others be there for me, and moving then on. This is the only life I get, and sitting around moping isn’t going to help. I deal with loss the same way religious people do, they have to go through the same thing.
Well, when my wife committed suicide I remember being relieved I didn’t believe in an aftelife or else I’d have had a harder time fighting the impulse to join her. I eventually took comfort in the fact that she was finally at peace, and although it wasn’t the peace she might have found while alive, I have to accept that people and events are not under my control.
I was watchng that show on PBS about Vincent Van Gough the other week, which said that we are unique in our awareness of our own mortality, but we keep our sanity in the face of this by developing an appreciation for the beauty of this world. I’ll buy that.
I am an atheist. I know that death is part of life. I will die as everything else will or has.
I just had to put down my first dog. I was sad as shit, but it helped.
I’m another who actually finds more comfort in agnosticism with tragedy.
My mother died of lung cancer related causes about a year and a half ago. My sister, who’s very religious, and I, an agnostic, both miss her very much. My sister is actually the bitter one- why did “God” take my mother when other women who smoked as much or more made it to 80, or other people who never go see their moms and from all appearances couldn’t care less if their mom lives or dies have them around til the old woman’s 90, or the old lady down the street’s mind is gone and she just sleeps all day and the husband she can’t remember is burdened down and yet she’s been like that for years while our mother who was still vital died at 70.
I see it as “Our mother somed for more than 50 years. She got lung cancer. That happens to a lot of people, some it doesn’t, but it’s natural.” Our cousin who died of Huntington’s disease in her forties after a horrible and prolonged illness was far more tragic, but it was because she had horribly booby-trapped genes. The co-worker recently killed by hydroplaning while in the prime of his life with teenaged kids- it sucked, but it was an accident and they happen and it’s not because his wife sinned or God “knows best”. The rational explanation is a sort of comfort in and of itself without worrying “is he in heaven now even though he wasn’t religious” and “why did God let this happen to me and not to the really bad people” baggage that I’ve seen people just damned near go nuts over.
I don’t believe my mother is up in heaven or whatever; her body has decomposed and her “spirit” is no more. I comfort myself that I know I was a good son to her when she was alive and that she knew I loved her and returned that love (along with lots of other emotions but that’s another story). I have no guilt. I can’t think of any of the people I love at the moment for whom I would have guilt if they died- I’d be devastated, yes, but I know I’ve been a good friend/relative to them, and it’s in large part because I don’t believe I’ll be able to hit Edit when I die so must fix it in the Time Window here on Earth if I wrong them.
As for my own mortality, I accept it. As some famous atheist once said, to think that atheists are less appreciative of the world and of life than those who believe in God is absurd as to us this is all there is, therefore we have to appreciate it more and do what we can to make it “as good as it gets”, and I mention this not to debate theism v. atheism but because it definitely informs how I look at things and how I take comfort in bad times.
Pretty much agreed with Skald and the other posters who described a ‘back into the cycle of life in the world’ approach to how I imagine the mechanics of death. I don’t kid myself that a deceased person knows or is happy to be ‘returned’ to nature, but this approach seems to make a very calming, beautiful kind of ‘sense’ that allows me to experience grief without tormenting myself. They’re gone - I’m sad - but it is nevertheless a fact that they as an individual are no longer in existence outside of memory.
So, to be honest, I deal with tragedy and loss by… feeling sad. I actually think it’s the only healthy way. I just let myself experience whatever I seem to be experiencing - even if it’s awful - and it kind of gets better on it’s own. I think that is one of grief’s natural functions and that trying to subvert it or force yourself not to feel what you feel by telling yourself that their passing is actually in some way ‘nice’ for them (heaven, reincarnation, etc) is not necessarily ‘bad’ but not the healthiest approach psychologically.
Largely, I suspect we deal with fatal tragedy much the way believers do with serious but non-fatal ones. I’ve certainly never seen any evidence that believers get much benefit from the belief at funeral time–without hearing their words, you wouldn’t be able to tell the believers and the atheists apart at a distance.
Heck, you might as well ask how believers deal with the anxiety of not knowing whether their loved ones are in hell or not, given that they don’t have the reassuring beliefs of the atheists.
I mourn and I grieve the loss of someone close to me. Then I move on while carrying with me the best of memories. As an earlier poster mentioned, “we all die”. Ok, maybe that wasn’t an exact quote, but we do. Never trust anyone older than 185 years old! Enjoy what you have, because that is all that you have.
I deal with tragedy by letting myself wallow in the “goddammit, that sucks” element inherent to every tragedy. I think about the people responsible for it or circumstances that led to it and wish things could have been different. I think about how the people involved are affected and whether I can do anything for them. If it’s a personal tragedy, I think about the times I shared with the person. I wonder how my actions could have been better, and how they should be in the future. And then, in time, I let it go. Some things you can’t ever completely get over, of course.
Bad luck and great misfortune can strike anybody at any time. Life can suck, other people can be incredibly cruel, and relative to every other natural phenomenon, humanity is pretty insignificant. And shit happens. But I can accept all that.
I never found religion to be comforting. It only raised more questions. It also seemed to me that the comfort religion offers does so by denying there really was a loss or injustice: Your mom isn’t gone forever, you’ll see her in the afterlife. No, the axe murderer didn’t really get away clean, he’ll be judged by God when he dies. A long time ago, I decided I preferred to have to deal with life sans religion, even if it meant feeling that life really sucked, or was extremely unfair. Religion’s way of comforting struck me as not really dealing with losses/misfortunes, and therefore not really coping with them.
I too feel comfort in knowing that my body, if I am able to successfully arrange to be buried without a casket and without being embalmed, will decompose and return to nature. It feels right to me. I know that a lot of life had to die for me to exist and to keep me living every additional day (plants, animals, etc), and I figure, if I’m grateful to be alive, it’s the least I can do to die in my turn and fuel new life. I really like the idea that even if my consciousness dies when I die, all the tiny bits of my body will eventually go on to be part of a multitude of lives that I will never come close to experiencing in this life.
I can see very clearly now that I had all of the information to put this together, I just didn’t see the obvious connection until fairly recently (actually, when I saw the movie The Fountain is when it all clicked) - the whole idea of life and death being interconnected and two halves of a whole, basically. And I also get a kick out of the idea that the only way for ‘me’ to truly live forever is to die. I’m really glad I saw that movie.
I think it’s easier for me to accept all of this because I don’t believe in God or Heaven or Hell. Evolution and the whole cycle of life thing makes God rather redundant.
I do confess, though, that I *hope *there is some sort of afterlife, just for the experience, but I believe that when I die my consciousness as the person **supergoose **will cease to exist. And like others have said, that’s not such a hard rock to swallow since it means I won’t exist to care, either.
Edit: I think I might not have actually addressed the subject of the thread. Oops. In a nutshell, though I admit that I have been fortunate not to have not yet suffered tragedy personally, but I believe that things happen at random, that it’s basically all chaos. Admitting that was scary, but now that I have, it makes tragedy seem more natural, I suppose. Maybe just inevitable. Everyone loses the cosmic lottery at some point.
Apparently, I’m going to be the first to say that I don’t cope well with tragedies.
Not only the person dissapear, but along with him all his memories, the details of his or her life, for instance the memory of his grand-father he was the last person alive to remember, and so on. That is even more tragic for me that the death of the person itself. And like it wasn’t enough, I’m going to think that no wrong he suffered (or caused) will be righted, that what he didn’t achieve will never be achieved, that if he had a shitty or sad life then that’s all there was for him.
I would cope better if I believed in some kind of (pleasant) afterlife and/or in an immanent justice.
