About my grandmother's death

I just returned from a short trip to Italy to attend my grandmother Clara's funeral. I was there for my family, of course, since my grandmother has ceased to exist and will no longer be, ever.

Clara was close to her nephews and nieces, and she was always kind to us while we were growing up. Still, she didn't really die last week at age 95, but rather a few years earlier, when her mind suddenly turned from sharp and alert to hardly being able to recognize where she was or who was visiting her. Despite this, her body was strong, and she physically survived herself for several more years, years that were meaningless to her and painful for us.

Which is why the Catholic service we attended with family and friends rang so hollow, even preposterous. The young priest did his work as well as one would expect. Of course, he didn't know my grandmother, so he had to limit himself to generic statements like “her daughters were lucky to have her as mother” (regardless of what the reality may have been). But that, of course, wasn't the worst of it.

The priest had to utter the standard nonsense, such as “we thank god for her life” (including the meaningless last years of suffering?), or “we make sense of the mystery of death through our faith” (that's like saying that one makes sense of something by embracing nonsense). There is no mystery of death. Death is part of the natural cycle of life, and once the particular combination of atoms that makes our existence possible decays beyond repair we are gone. Sad but natural, no spooky “mystery” involved, no need to prey on people’s emotions and hopes.

My skepticism, indeed my irritation, during the service was of course to be expected. After all, I'm a godless atheist. But I had time to look around me and watch the reactions of people I know well. Perhaps the most distraught of my relatives was my aunt, my mother's sister. She is allegedly a devout Catholic, and yet the priest's words seemed to be of no comfort at all to her, as if she didn't really believe that her mother was now in “a better place,” as if she realized just as much as I did that this was the final curtain, with no possibility of an encore.

And than there was one of my brothers, who is what I think of as a smart Catholic. It still isn't exactly clear to me what he believes, but he often runs into trouble with the more pious branches of the family because of his rejection of concepts like demons and hell. More than anything else he seemed to be ironically amused at the priest's clumsy attempts to turn my grandmother's funeral into a “joyous” occasion for celebrating “the word of god.”

Clara will be cremated, another instance in which the self-professed infallible Popes of the Catholic faith apparently changed their mind about what scripture says: it used to be that you had to preserve the dead body while waiting for the end time resurrection, apparently now ashes are ok, god will simply add back the necessary water (and restore the low level of entropy).

Funerals, of course, are for the living, not the departed. It was nice to be able to offer as much comfort as I could to my mother, my brothers, my cousins, and my aunt. That comfort did not derive from the malicious illusion that we will all soon see Clara again. It derived from the knowledge that we are here for each other, to celebrate the joys of life together, but also to share the inevitable painful losses. Such is the human condition, but we are strong enough to be able to bear it with the help of our loved ones, no divine givers of random suffering need apply.