Growing Up Godless by Deborah Mitchell

Author:Deborah Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling Ethos

Dealing with Death in the Family

As nonbelievers, how do we help the people we love when they are dying? I know, we are all dying, but when death is close, how do we give comfort?

My father died this past summer. He was a healthy guy, and for six months his doctor gave him steroid shots in his back, thinking that all the running, weight lifting, and tennis had hurt him. It turns out that he had pancreatic cancer. Once he was diagnosed, he died in less than two months. I flew down to spend two out of his last four weeks with him. It was a difficult thing to see—a strong man struggling with the inevitability and nearness of his death, yet clinging to the hope of just one more year of life, which his doctor said might be possible.

After he died, people who knew him said the expected niceties: He didn’t suffer long. At least you had time to get to know him. He’s in God’s hands. He’s in a better place now.

That last comment is the one that brings me to tears, even now. My father loved this place, this planet, with all its flaws and unpredictability. He had a huge appetite for learning and reading and thinking. He never talked about heaven because, well, what could be better than this? But what I saw as his biggest fear when he was dying was that he would make the journey from life to death alone. I think now that must be the closest we get to hell—the lonely movement from this life into nothingness and the fear you feel knowing that you’re about to be gone forever.

Towards the end, he had Sundown Syndrome. He would grow agitated in the evening as it started to get dark in the house, so in the late afternoon my mother would rush around turning on all the lights in the house to simulate daytime. But, somehow, the body knows. And Sundown Syndrome must surely be a way that the body recognizes, consciously or not, that it’s near the end of its own day. My dad knew, intuitively, that his life was wrapping up, even though he was fighting hard to stay alive—as he said—for just one more year.

How do we comfort the dying? My friend’s mom was comforted by the fact that her God was going to meet her after she took her last breath. Her death was not nearly as much of a struggle. We nonbelievers don’t have the luxury of that fantasy. It’s not even something that we can pretend to believe. For those of us who don’t believe, we just have to hold tight to each other. For the first time in his life, my father reached his hand out to me—and I held it. That way of making a connection was not only a bridge to another person, but also an offer of forgiveness for all the hurt, for all the things we wished we had said but didn’t.

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