Grief Without God

My grief journey would be easier if I believed in God.

I used to. I have a giant cross and a Jesus fish tattooed on my back, for crying out loud. It used to be a huge part of my identity, made visible through the markings on my skin. And I do miss many parts of that faith. My mom keeps encouraging me to come back to church. For the community, she says. I think she hopes renewed belief would follow if I just showed up.

But I can’t force belief. And I can’t show up for that community when I don’t share the fundamental beliefs that form it. It would be dishonest. I’m not a believer, so I don’t belong there.

As a teen, I was deeply involved in my faith. Youth group, Bible camps, devotional groups. All of it. But as I studied more and asked harder questions, my certainty faded. I couldn’t believe just because that’s what I’d been taught. Or because it was the religion I happened to have been born into.

But I’m not here to argue theology. There are brilliant people who believe in God, and brilliant people who don’t. I’m somewhere between the agnostic and the atheist camp; enchanted by the possibility, unconvinced by the claims.

What I want to talk about is grief, and what feels different about grieving without the benefit of religious certainty.

I see real beauty in faith traditions. Community. Ritual. The ability to “give it to God.” The trust that something larger is holding the weight. And the belief — the one I really wish I could access, the one that makes me truly jealous of the believers — that you will see your loved one again, whole and free from suffering. I close my eyes and see my son’s dead body, his beautiful face mottled in death, and I yearn for a reality in which I can honestly grasp a truth – any truth – that gives him back to me.

I understand why that comforts people. I truly do. I just can’t make myself believe something because I so desperately want it to be true.

Coming to terms with death is hard for most people. Trying to do that while believing death is truly the end adds a particular kind of weight. At least it does for me.

When I was fresh out of college and working at a manufacturing plant in South Carolina, one of the women I worked with lost her 21-year-old son to a motorcycle accident. I too was 21 at the time, and still fairly new to even accepting that I was agnostic. And it really hit me. Life is depressingly finite, and any of us can be taken at any time. While I never met that young man, in a way I mourned his loss. I mourned the loss of the afterlife, or at least the concept of it. And I hugged my loved ones tighter because of it.

Instead of traditional burial or cremation, we chose to compost my son Declan when he died. It’s what I’d want for myself, too. I wanted to be able to plant something in his dirt to keep a piece of him, or his energy, alive and with us. Those plants have become my version of continuity. Of an afterlife. When I look at those plants, I like to think he’s there in some small way. Still a part of the cycle of living things. I didn’t want to keep his corpse trapped and frozen with formaldehyde, but needed to allow him to become dirt again so that his energy could continue in the circle of life. To me, that’s the only eternity I can honestly believe in.

There are hard parts to grieving without belief in an afterlife. But there is something grounding, too, in seeing this life as the only one we know we have. Not a rehearsal, not a prelude. Just precious and finite and real.

I also struggle with some of the comfort that others try to give me when they tell me that Declan is in a better place. That I’ll see him again. Or that God has a plan. I know they mean well, so I keep my mouth shut. I am glad that they can find comfort in those words and have no interest in taking that away from them. But it feels hollow to me. And I have to remind myself that their faith is not about me, even when their words are about my son.

I’ve come to view prayer as a form of meditation. And I access a lot of the benefits of prayer through actual meditation, writing, yoga and being present with my living children. Honoring Declan’s memory is sacred to me. As is advocating for children like him who can’t advocate for themselves. I will always miss my son. But I’ll keep striving for peace along the way. I don’t have tidy answers. I just know this is the framework I’m grieving inside of.