Faith and Death

Not too long after I had decided to get married and had had a few daydreams about how my great grandfather would be proud of me getting married he died. Probably my reaction was a natural one but I still felt a bit ashamed. I mean who is angry with someone for dieing before an event they would be invited to. If anyone had the right to be angry, it’s the deciest. Then again, my great granddad didn’t know he would be invited. Oh, and also it’s very extremely unlikely that he cares anymore. It’s quite more likely, that he’s not any more.

I liked the funeral kind of, as much as one can like a “goodbye forever” party where everyone feels sad that they’ll never ever meet the person again. But I liked it in that it was private, just the closest family. Of his over 30 great grandchildren just the oldest two were present. And after the short ceremony we all went to a dining place and just chatted about the things that family members chat about with each other as well as remembered both my great grandfather and his wife, who had died five years earlier. It was sweet.

There were two scary thoughts I had. It was sad burying a great grandfather I hardly knew from a few visits. How much more sad it must be to bury someone much closer to me, like most of the other people there. The rest of my grandparents, my parents and their siblings. If all is well, I still get to go to most of their funerals. And how kind of scary and sad must it feel for my grandparents to be the elders of the family. Yes, they have their children and grandchildren, but no parent of either of them lives any more.

It was almost by accident that just before my opaps passing away I had lost belief in life after death and the good things that the dead can do for us. But this unbelief made the whole thing even scarier for me. Before I got convinced of the unlikeliness of an afterlife I would have thought the only scary thing is to be the most experienced one, the one that everyone would look up to. Because I thought death would be something to look forward to, finally to know what exactly happens next. Not so any more.

What happened was that my Love begun borrowing Richard Dawkins’s books one by one, reading them with enthusiasm, watching all videos available with Dawkins talking and submitting me to those same books, same videos. The God that Dawkins wanted to free people of was the revengeful angry God of the Old testament. As a side effect, he convinced me my lovely fantasies were also illogical and highly improbable. I complained to my Love about this and told him how my beliefs were completely different and nice and I wanted them. He asked me questions and pointed out discrepencies and unlikelinesses to me. This made me totally sceptic.

The feeling was not unlike what it would feel like if I was waiting for a bus, a very comfortable and fun bus that would take me to a really cool place. Then the two of them come along and tell me that according to the bus shedule my bus has gone long ago. For now I am left without a ride, but my mom always says it’s no good chasing after buses and boys, because the next will come along soon. I think I want the nice afterlife so bad, that I’ll figure a way to circumvent logic, to keep believing in afterlife.