Dealing With Death

Everyone dies.  What happens to us after we die is one of the questions humans have sought to know probably for as long as we've been on the Earth, and different groups of people have come up with their own theories.

All religions believe in a soul.  Christians and Muslims believe that when we die, our spirit or our soul will either go to Heaven to be with God or we'll go to Hell to be ruled by the Devil.  Catholics further believe in Purgatory, which is "an intermediate state after physical death in which those destined for heaven undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven." (quoted from Wikipedia).  Mormons believe in something similar: they believe that after we die, our spirit goes either to Spirit Paradise or to Spirit Prison (also known as Hell, where people have a chance to repent of their sins and go to Paradise), based on how you lived your life.  Once Christ comes back and the Millennium starts and everyone can be resurrected, then our spirits will be taken out of Paradise or Prison and reunited with our bodies and then assigned to one of the Three Kingdoms of Glory or to Outer Darkness for the really really bad people.

Buddhists believe that the spirit goes into another body, and which body that is depends on how good they were in their previous life: if you were good, then you came back as a healthy human again, but if you were bad, then you came back as a crippled or diseased person, or even an animal.

There are many other religions that I don't know enough about, or don't know about at all.  These I've listed are the main ones around the world right now.  But what all religions have in common is the belief in the soul, that we are more than our physical bodies.

I've been thinking about death for the past couple of days.  Yesterday David Bowie died.  Also yesterday I found out that the grandmother of one of my good friends died this past Sunday.

When you're not religious, or when you were but you don't believe in a God anymore, you look at death differently than a religious person does.  I'll take Christianity as an example since that's what I grew up with and that's the most widespread religion right now.

Christians will look at David Bowie and say, "He's probably in Heaven because he was a good person."  My friend's family will look at their grandmother and they'll be sad but they'll think, "She was a good person, and I know we'll see her again and be together forever, because we've been sealed in the temple to each other."  They have hope because they believe in an afterlife and in a just and fair God who will reward good deeds and good people with Heaven.

Then there are those of us who either never were religious or we've left our religions and/or our belief in a God.  When we look at death, we don't know what happens.  Some of these people are terrified of death because they don't know what happens to us.  Do we cease to exist?  Do we have a soul that goes up to Heaven or down to Hell?  Does our soul remain on Earth, walking around invisible where only a few people with the gift to see spirits can see us? (think the movies "Ghost" and "Heart and Souls").  Are we indeed reborn, our spirits put into a new body?

And finally, there are people who look at the physiology of the body and the brain, and they firmly believe that there is no soul, there is no spirit, that our brain is who we are.  We have a body, we have a brain, and that's it.  So when our brain stops working, when our brain dies, we're dead.  We're gone.  We cease to exist.

I am now an atheist, and until just recently I was in the second category.  I'm not scared of death because in my mind, when I die then I'll finally be able to know which of all the world's religious beliefs got it right.  I held on to the hope that I do have a spirit, that I will continue to exist after I die, and that I will get to see the spirits of my loved ones again.  But now after looking a little more into the sciences, I'm coming to grips with the ideas of the third category: that we are our brain.  Our memories, our thoughts, our senses, our feelings, and even our spiritual experiences—they are all the work of our brain.  And once our brain dies, we're gone.

I look at David Bowie.  According to my new line of thinking, he's gone forever.  But his influence will remain here because of his music and his movies.  People of my generation will always remember him as the Goblin King in "Labyrinth" with those suave mannerisms and those tight pants.  ;)  Others will remember him more for his music.  While he's not on my list of favorite musicians, I recognize that many people liked him and they will remember him and what he did.

Now I'm looking at my own life, wondering what I will leave behind.  When I die, my existence will only be missed by a few handfuls of people; what we've shared together will mean something to them, and I'm not dismissing that as unimportant.  But as far as society as a whole, I haven't done anything noteworthy.  I haven't written any great books like Tolkien or Carl Sagan or Darwin or Shakespeare did that are read and enjoyed by millions of people.  I am not a great singer like Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, or a great musician like Mozart or Vivaldi.  I am not a great actress like Elizabeth Taylor or Katherine Hepburn whose names and legacies will live on in cinema history.  I am not a great philosopher like Aristotle or Confucius whose ideas will span the centuries.  I haven't written any papers in scholarly journals that others will read and cite for their research.  I am not a selfless person who is spending my life or a career serving the poor and needy and the sick.  I'm not someone who has inspired my society to greatness in any way.  I am an average person, a wife and a stay-at-home mother of two kids who's doing her best to raise them and not go crazy in the meantime.  ;)  I have my own interests and hobbies outside of being a mom, and I make a conscious effort to remember those things about myself so I don't lose who I am.  But those hobbies are pleasures of mine, they're not for the betterment of society.  My sphere of influence is so small that it is insignificant to all but a few people, those closest to me.

I've thought about it, and what I do have is this blog.  This is something I've written that anyone who comes across it can read and hopefully get something out of it for their own lives.  Perhaps some readers are LDS members who are struggling with issues in the Church, and here they can find someone who had the same issues they did.  Perhaps there are those who feel they aren't strong enough to leave the Church, or even to examine it with critical thinking.

I'm here to tell those people that you are strong enough.

Looking at the Church with critical thinking wasn't easy.  Developing critical thinking skills in the first place wasn't easy, since what is stressed in the Church is faith, obedience, to "first doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith" (Pres. Uchtdorf, Oct. 2013) and to "lean not unto thine own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5).  Coming to my conclusions about the Church was hard for me because I was raised in it and I really believed it was true.  It influenced how I saw the world, how I saw the purpose of life, how I saw people's behavior and its consequences, and my definition of morality.  And to look at the Church honestly and factually with critical thinking wasn't something I'd ever done before.  Not only that, but all of my immediate family members are LDS, as are all the immediate family members of my husband's family.  Most of the friends I made in school were LDS because of the strong community the Church offers, so leaving the Church was to leave my circle of friends and the possibility of easily meeting new friends whenever we moved.

Leaving was mostly liberating, because I finally felt validated in the thoughts and doubts about the Church that had troubled me for years; everything suddenly fits together when you realize "the Church isn't true".

I will be honest: the hardest thing of all was looking at scientific evidence and realizing that in all likelihood there is no God.  It's hard because it feels like starting from scratch, and you have to look at the world differently and to look at morality differently.

But it gets easier.  Human brains are incredible organs, and through mine I've been able to adjust pretty well.  And you know what?  Life isn't so bad without a belief in God.  At first it was rough, but I don't feel a sense of hopelessness anymore.  I'm looking at death as final, and that life on this Earth is my one shot at existence, and it's helped me want to put forth more effort to make the most of it.  Not for the sake of a reward in Heaven, but for my own sake.

Sometimes there are things in life that really suck, and sometimes we're not sure how we can make it through the day or the week or the year.  But our brains are capable of incredible things, and we don't give ourselves enough credit.  I have a saying up on my wall that says, "She Believed She Could, So She Did."  We have as much inner strength as we allow ourselves to have.  Our bodies might fail us, or it might seem like our circumstances are too much for us to handle.  Sometimes we're right.  But our life and our existence have as much value as we decide they have, and it's up to us to decide what we do with them.

I'm hoping I don't die any time soon, because I have young children.  That's one of the reasons why I haven't bought a motorcycle yet, even though I got my license about six months ago.  Although going places on a motorcycle is something I would love to do and that would be very fulfilling for me, the chances of getting into a crash and being seriously injured or killed are high, and my kids are still very young and they need a mother around who loves and can care for them and who has taken on the job of raising them.  My job is to keep them healthy and to prepare them to survive in this world, and I still have a lot of work to do.  In the meantime I'm going to continue with my (safe) hobbies that give me pleasure and that make me feel fulfilled, and I'm going to continue to learn as much as I can about things that interest me.  Critical thinking is a skill we need to learn (and that we are NOT taught or encouraged to develop in the LDS church), and I'm hoping to continue to cultivate mine and to teach my kids critical thinking when they're old enough.

I'm still not afraid of death, even though I'm now thinking that death is the end of my existence.  I really hope my last days or minutes aren't filled with pain, but death is inevitable and probably final, and I'm still adjusting to that new line of thinking.  And I'm doing alright.  I'm not blissfully happy, but I'm not miserable either.  I'm accepting.  It feels good to face reality head-on.