Atheist Mortality

Michael Rubinkam/Associated Press

As I was checking the news this morning, I came across a story out of Pennsylvania about an elderly woman who exhumed her dead husband and twin sister and kept them on couches in her house for years.

Somehow, about two-thirds of the way through the story, the article seems to take a turn toward blaming this incident on her lack-of or weak religious belief:

"Well, I felt differently about death."

Part of her worries that after death, there's ... nothing. "Is that the grand finale?" But then she gets up at night and gazes at the stars in the sky and the deer in the fields, and she thinks, "There must be somebody who created this. It didn't come up like mushrooms."
So she is ambivalent about God and the afterlife. "I don't always go to church, but I want to believe," she said.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren't particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.

For them, "death doesn't exist," she said. "They deny death."

Ms. Stevens, she said, "came up with a very extreme expression of it. She got her bodies back, and she felt fulfilled by having them at home. She's beating death by bringing them back."

What?? Wow. I was temporarily speechless.

That is quite a leap.

Really, isn’t it the religious people who believe that total death doesn’t exist because a spirit or soul lives on in some afterlife? Is that not pure denial of death? And, for a moment, I’m going to be truly nitpicky and say that the phrase, “because they fear that death is truly the end” really irked me. I think that death is “truly the end,” but it’s not a fear – it’s a fact in my mind. I feel like the journalist (Michael Rubinkam of the Associated Press) is implying that the sense that religious views are wrong evokes an unavoidable and deserved anxiety. It’s as if the article is saying that a nontheist SHOULD feel this way when considering death.  Also, why would it be true (as this psychiatrist professor says) that just because a person thinks that biological death is the complete experience of death, they are in denial of death?  Maybe they are simply in denial of life after death, which seems like a pretty rational denial to me.

My other concern is that this generalization was made simply because the woman took an agnostic stance. She didn’t say she was an atheist. She actually sounded like she DID have faith in some type of god despite the fact that she didn’t subscribe to a religion per se. She “wants” to believe in something spiritual, but that was not enough to convince this professor and her interviewer that the overriding reason for this was her lack of faith. I’d hate to see what she had to say about a real atheist.

Clearly, this woman has some psychological problems, but they seem to be rooted more in loneliness or social strain rather than lack of religious vigor. This woman was desperately attempting to console herself and possibly deal with the issue of her own mortality after she was left feeling alone in the world (and I think most people would feel that extreme loneliness in her situation of losing the two people she loved most in life). Her anthropomorphism of the corpses didn’t seem to approach a true delusion – she seems to understand that they are dead on some level. Death DOES seem to exist to her as a reality, contray to what the psychiatrist believes to be true of nonreligious people like her, and she is struggling with that idea and attempting in her own (misguided) way of coming to terms with that.  That fact might actually, in one small way, make her a little more sane than the person who “sees” the dead Virgin Mary visiting them or prays to and makes choices according to the divine direction of long-dead loved ones with the strong conviction that they are still alive somewhere.

This is an extremely sad story, and my heart goes out to this woman. I hope that she manages to get the help she needs to reach a sense of peace after living through the deaths of her two closest loved ones.

As for this journalist - Michael Rubinkam – I hope that at some point he learns to be a little more careful about balancing his stories. Choosing your sources wisely is part of getting the story right. His editor will certainly be getting a letter from me.

Maybe in the future I should write a little more on the subject of mortality from an atheist perspective. It’s certainly an under-discussed topic, in my opinion.

S.A.M.