Atheists, how do you face the fact your dead loved ones are gone forever? (meaning, believe)
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One of the hardest realities I had to come to terms with when I became an atheist was knowing that my beloved wife would be no more when she passed away. Unlike Christians who have this crazy belief that their loved ones' spirits will survive and be waiting for them in heaven when they die, we atheists know that the lack of any scientific evidence for a spirit existing pretty much clinches the deal that when we die everything that made us "US" is gone forever. It must be devastating to think that your loved ones, so vibrant and precious to you now will disintegrate into nothingness one day. It almost makes it tempting to deceive oneself into believing as the Christians do that their physical bodies do possess a spirit that will go on living forever in some mythical heaven.
To see how the world operates--that all of evolution exists by one set of creatures feeding on other creatures, that pain and suffering exist in this world to such a degree that it does, that evil and immorality are at such unimaginable levels on this planet that it boggles the senses, that evolution caused the creation of such nightmarish creatures as giant leeches, giant hornets, giant centipedes, etc.--all this makes me think that this whole enterprise called earth and everything in it was a gigantic waste, a mistake; that there simply was no point in it; that we didn't ask to be born into this gigantic cesspool called earth but we're here anyway, and so every day we should be trying to squeeze as much happiness out of it as we can before we all die and disappear into the ether until the universe itself burns itself out and is one big dark empty void.
How do you atheists cope with such devastating knowledge? By not thinking about it? By just training yourself each day to accept that's the reality of the situation?
I lost my first wife to mental illness. She is still on the mortal coil, albeit in the form of a Thorazine zombie. She is lost to me as surely as if she were dead. I'm not sure she'd even remember me after ... what ... 30 years now since I took the kids and left, mostly out of self defense; when I had the sad duty to inform her of our son's death six years ago, her handlers were not even aware that she had children, as she had never spoken of it (you'd think the dummies would care enough to read her case files, but alas, they aren't paid to care).
My second wife died of a rare illness in '07. I've been remarried now for enough years that my current wife will shortly set the endurance record, if you will.
In the gospels, the Pharisees came to Jesus and laid out a hypothetical that was designed to get him to take sides in the theological debate du jour concerning the nature of the afterlife. A man married a woman, and died. One of his brothers took the widow as his wife, as was the creepy custom of the day. Then he died also, and the third brother also took her and died. The question posed was, "whose wife is she in the resurrection then"? And the answer Jesus gave was that there is no marriage in heaven.
So if Christianity were true, then your beloved wife would be nothing but chopped liver to you in heaven anyway, apparently. Of course marriage in Jesus' day was not freighted with the romantic ideals of modern relationships; love and/or romance and/or passion being front and center is actually a pretty recent development in ideals and expectations around marriage. Jesus was really just addressing the utilitarian inheritance and child-rearing mechanism that marriage in his day was. Love or emotional support was probably not even on his mind. What can I say; Jesus was apparently as much a product of his time as anyone.
If you were married more than once and were separated from multiple wives by death, then if you were on good and loving terms with them at the end, and there was an afterlife where they were all hoping for a reunion, it would just be ... awkward.
So in other words the notion of our departed loved ones still "being" has a number of practical obstacles to being meaningfully realized; it sounds great in theory but in practice ... we get married or involved in any relationship really because ideally both parties are good for each other and provide support and emotional nourishment of some kind, and what we mourn when we lose them is the loss of their daily presence and involvement and comfort with us. If special relationships mean anything at all, then the dearly departed suffer the loss of your amazing self just as much. Heaven is less heavenly without you. No one seems to ever think about how it would cut both ways -- if love even MEANS anything in reality.
So point one is that the Christian afterlife is an incorherent concept and nowhere near as comforting as people initially suppose it to be.
To my mind, the alternative afterlife concepts, especially those involving reincarnation schemes, are even worse.
So I don't feel that I'm giving up much actually in that regard. Cold comfort, that.
Now it's true as you say that we are left with "nature, red in tooth and claw", etc., but I don't really see this as "devastating knowledge". It is just the way things are. It is comforting for me to be able to see things as they are, rather than imagine them as they are "supposed" to be (a nice way of saying, "as I want them"). It is comforting to me to know that my life has an endpoint, because it puts a cap on my suffering. Sure it puts a cap on my enjoyment, too, but ... the older I get, the more I realize that I have a "best used by date", that enjoyment is finite anyway (he typed, studiously ignoring the bout of sciatica brewing in his nether regions, and the throb in his left arm from yesterday's double-elder-dose of flu vaccine).
What is so bad about being a finite creature not overstaying his welcome?
Of course the 800 pound gorilla in the room is, how do I cope with my losses?
One thing I do is I don't make them all about me. Both of my previous wives suffered terribly, each in their own way.
Letting go of my first marriage, agonizing as it was for me at the time, was the best thing I ever did for my first wife because it got her what help and relief exists for her. She may be emotionally gutted and her personality blunted by the meds, but she isn't actively psychotic or hallucinating anymore, either. She told me not long after they got her stabilized that she's not capable of being a parent, and she was right. Implicit in that is that she's not capable of being a loving partner either. The sooner both she and I recognized that, the better it was for us both (not to mention for our children). Yes it was the death of a dream, but dreams need somewhere to go and die, or they just become another albatross, a quest as pointless as Ahab's for the White Whale. Sometimes you just have to admit you're wrong or screwed (or both) and do a reset.
My second wife was sane (I DO learn from mistakes!) but she suffered physically in almost every imaginable way, for endless years. Her death put her beyond the reach of that suffering. To hold onto her any longer would have been selfish of me. I still remember them rolling her corpse into the ambulance after she died at home, it is seared into my memory. The only thing "devastating" was the lingering sense that any god worth worshiping could have spared her that suffering, but you know, whether some deity decided it was a great idea for her to suffer like that, or nature just handed her a bad set of cards, doesn't really matter; it happened, and it was past time for it to stop.
I also have something that death can't take from me -- the good times we had together. It was way too brief, but it was amazing. It makes me smile.
Of course the other factor -- one which I doubt even theists would disagree with -- is that when one door closes, however important and fancy the door -- it doesn't mean there are no other opportunities for you do have interesting and rewarding experiences, if you don't get hung up on your specific losses forever. Honor them, mourn them, but don't let it take the joy out of life. I can tell you that my 2nd wife was an amazing woman, and the world is the worse for her demise, but she made it clear to me that she didn't want me to fail to be open to other opportunities, maybe even with some other amazing woman.
Which brings me to another point. We tend to put spouses and children on a pedestal and so romanticize them and dramatize our sorrow that we loose sight of the fact that they're just people. Special, amazing people, but not the only ones that exist.
When my son died, my stepson stepped right up to the plate, promising that as long as I wanted, he'd be there for me. And he's every bit as amazing as my son -- just in somewhat different ways, but he is a great comfort to me and I love him as my own. My third wife (and my stepson's mother) is every bit as amazing in her own way as my second. And my current relationships are as tricky and fraught as the others too, lol. Life is messy and full off cross-currents and undertows and storms and pleasant, peaceful meadows and great mountain vistas and foggy bogs and it's all there for the taking, regardless of your gains and losses.
I am sorry you are feeing sad and bereft tonight, and I wish I could be present with you physically and buy you a drink or distract you or something but yeah, this pathetic missive will have to do. And yes it does sort of come down to training yourself to accept the "reality of the situation" ... but do take time to count the flip side of your loss, which is that it's a loss you care about because there were good times and don't neglect to celebrate those. Also don't forget what you wife contributed to your character and wisdom. My 2nd wife for example saw me struggling with a problematic client once, and introduced me to a new concept: firing the client. It was simple, elegant, don't now why I didn't see it myself ... but she did me that service, and I've used it a couple of times since and saved myself countless aggravations. It still makes me smile to think of the bazzilion little contributions she made to my existence like that. Don't loose sight of those things, Thrill. They matter.
One of the hardest realities I had to come to terms with when I became an atheist was knowing that my beloved wife would be no more when she passed away. Unlike Christians who have this crazy belief that their loved ones' spirits will survive and be waiting for them in heaven when they die, we atheists know that the lack of any scientific evidence for a spirit existing pretty much clinches the deal that when we die everything that made us "US" is gone forever. It must be devastating to think that your loved ones, so vibrant and precious to you now will disintegrate into nothingness one day. It almost makes it tempting to deceive oneself into believing as the Christians do that their physical bodies do possess a spirit that will go on living forever in some mythical heaven.
To see how the world operates--that all of evolution exists by one set of creatures feeding on other creatures, that pain and suffering exist in this world to such a degree that it does, that evil and immorality are at such unimaginable levels on this planet that it boggles the senses, that evolution caused the creation of such nightmarish creatures as giant leeches, giant hornets, giant centipedes, etc.--all this makes me think that this whole enterprise called earth and everything in it was a gigantic waste, a mistake; that there simply was no point in it; that we didn't ask to be born into this gigantic cesspool called earth but we're here anyway, and so every day we should be trying to squeeze as much happiness out of it as we can before we all die and disappear into the ether until the universe itself burns itself out and is one big dark empty void.
How do you atheists cope with such devastating knowledge? By not thinking about it? By just training yourself each day to accept that's the reality of the situation?
it seems to me that if someone actually is "trying to squeeze as much happiness" out of each day that they can (which the OP urges), then they wouldn't view planet earth and all life as a "gigantic cesspool" (which the OP also expresses).
Last edited by Tzaphkiel; 09-09-2023 at 08:29 PM..
I don't think religion is really all the great for dealing with death. If anything, I think it robs people of some pretty serious growth if you can handle the pain. My bst advice is to just connect with people who have been thru the same thing. Find other widowers and ask them the questions you are asking atheists. They have the answers you want, not us.
One of the hardest realitiesI had to come to terms with when I became an atheist was knowing that my beloved wife would be no more when she passed away.(
Respectfully;
Stopped reading after that.
And sorry for your loss.
But “realities”??
Seriously? How do you empirically know that it’s the REALITY?
Have you ever died and came back to actually KNOW that there is no life after death and there is absolutely nothing after death?
And if you had died and saw that there is nothing after death then you are wrong in that count as well. It’s because, after death, your consciousness was there to perceive and realize that there is nothing after death. Which means there IS consciousnesses after death.
The true answer and the true reality is, we don’t really know. what’s after death?
I mean, the idea of loved ones being just gone is less distressing than the idea of them being in hell.
To my mind, we live on in the legacy of lives. If we increased the amount of love, kindness, joy, peace, humor, satisfaction, creativity, etc. that others experience, they pass that forward, and others pass that forward...it's like ripples turning into waves. Put another way, if someone who has died is still inspiring others' choices, it's like they're not really gone.
This might be a little abstract, but I also find it comforting to think about how the permanence of death is really a function of how we, as humans, experience time-space. The concept of linear time is a function of how our brains record information, not a fixed characteristic of the universe. Those who have already died and those who aren't born yet exist, they're just not here, separated from us by time, just like someone who's separated by distance isn't here either. IDK, sorry, that made more sense in my head than it did when I tried to write it out. I swear I'm not stoned, lol.
I mean, the idea of loved ones being just gone is less distressing than the idea of them being in hell.
To my mind, we live on in the legacy of lives. If we increased the amount of love, kindness, joy, peace, humor, satisfaction, creativity, etc. that others experience, they pass that forward, and others pass that forward...it's like ripples turning into waves. Put another way, if someone who has died is still inspiring others' choices, it's like they're not really gone.
This might be a little abstract, but I also find it comforting to think about how the permanence of death is really a function of how we, as humans, experience time-space. The concept of linear time is a function of how our brains record information, not a fixed characteristic of the universe. Those who have already died and those who aren't born yet exist, they're just not here, separated from us by time, just like someone who's separated by distance isn't here either. IDK, sorry, that made more sense in my head than it did when I tried to write it out. I swear I'm not stoned, lol.
How do you atheists cope with such devastating knowledge? By not thinking about it? By just training yourself each day to accept that's the reality of the situation?
It is the circle of life: we are born, we live, we die.
As an unapologetic atheist I am a bit envious of those with faith and their belief that they will be reunited with a lost loved one. That must be very comforting at such a terrible time. Me? I think the entire concept of Heaven and Hell is not unlike what mom told me about getting gifts from Santa at Christmas. No I do not believe if you are good you go to this Heaven and if you are bad you will burn in eternity in Hell. Common sense tells me that is nonsense. When my loved ones die they are gone. Forever. And I will always believe this.
The true answer and the true reality is, we don’t really know. what’s after death?
Well then, that's not of any practical use to the grieving. I'd argue that knowing one way or the other is actually better. If even someone predisposed to or leaning toward the seeming comfort of knowing there's an afterlife acknowledges not knowing, then ... well ... the only question then is, what is our default when we don't know if a thing is, or isn't? Do we not then assume that it isn't? Otherwise we're counting on something that isn't certain.
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