When Comforting Thoughts Don’t Comfort Everyone

When we talk about ways we can cope with mortality and death, there’s this weird, hard reality: Some people aren’t going to agree. Not everyone finds the same ideas comforting. In fact, a particular view of death might give great solace to Person A — while Person B finds it hollow, or even upsetting.

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I recently posted a link to a piece PZ Myers had written about death. PZ reviewed my new book, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God — and he then went on to talk about death from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist. That view, in short: Dying is, quite literally, a necessary and inevitable consequence of being alive and multi-cellular. If you want to not die, and you want the people in your life to not die, the only option is for us to not be born.

Commenter ethereal had serious problems with this idea — or, to be more accurate, with presenting this idea as a comfort. In her comment, she said:

PZ Myers’ post is absolutely terrible where comforting thoughts are concerned. It couldn’t have been more terrible if he spontaneously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the middle of writing it. Behind the scientific explanation of death (which might be appreciated in a different context), his post is a giant is-ought fallacy. And it’s awful. It can be used to justify anything. Ebola? Shut up you whiners, this is how the disease spreads, this is how it kills people, everything is okay, nothing sad here. Hurricanes? This is how they arise, this is how the human body reacts to blunt trauma, nothing sad here. Terrorism? This is how guns work, this is the result of ballistic trauma, nothing sad here.

She then went on to tell a heartbreaking story about a friend who was killed by a drunk driver less than a year ago — and about some of the appalling reactions she had to deal with from religious believers. (Her complete comment is here.) She wound up by saying:

Too TL;DR? Let’s put it in PZ Myers’ terms:
Vehicular homicide? Bicycle dynamics, internal combustion, effects of alcohol on reaction time, blunt trauma. It’s natural, nothing to be sad about, shut up.

Here’s my reply (edited slightly from my original comment):

ethereal: First, and most importantly: I am so sorry for your loss. And I’m so sorry that you had such a horrible experience with how the people around you handled that death and your grief.

If I’ve learned anything from what grieving people say about their grief, it’s that people grieve very differently. Among other things, people have very different reactions to different ideas about death, and to different forms of comfort in the face of it. That’s obviously true when it comes to believers and atheists — but it’s also true for different atheists.

For instance: Many atheists take great comfort in the idea that being dead will be the same as not having been born yet — and not having been born yet wasn’t anything to fear or be upset about. For me, this is entirely non-comforting. I’m not afraid of the state of being dead — I just really like being alive, and I really want the dead people I loved to be back in my life. I do talk about this idea in my book, because so many atheists find it helpful and consoling. But it does nothing at all to touch my own fears about mortality.

For me, however, the idea that death is a natural and inevitable consequence of being alive is very comforting. I tend to see death as unfair, as somehow cheating me or ripping me off. It’s irrational, but it’s how I emotionally react. Understanding that death is an inevitable package deal with life helps me accept it.

It is true that this idea doesn’t offer comfort in the face of all deaths. If someone died much too young, or if they died unnecessarily because of human brutality or carelessness or selfishness, then the idea that mortality is a package deal with life probably isn’t going to help. And if there’s a particular kind of death that can be prevented or delayed — Ebola, drunk driving accidents, leukemia, murder — then of course we should not just accept it. Of course we should work to stop it, as much as we can. There’s a difference between saying, “Death is inevitable” — and saying, “This particular death is inevitable,” or, “This particular form of death is inevitable.”

For me, though, this idea — the idea that death is an inevitable and necessary consequence of being alive — does help me cope with some deaths. It helps me cope with my father’s death of natural causes at age 79, and it helps me cope with my own mortality and eventual death (hopefully of natural causes, hopefully at a pretty old age). Different ideas don’t just help different people — they help in the face of different deaths.

Finally: Saying that an idea about death can offer comfort, or that it can be a strategy for coping, is not the same as saying “nothing to be sad about, shut up.” It’s not even the slightest bit the same. That’s not what I mean by “comfort,” and I doubt highly that it’s what PZ means. To quote myself from the book:

When I say that some particular view of death offers comfort, I don’t mean that it completely eradicates any pain or grief associated with death. Of course it doesn’t. Nothing does that — not even religion. (More on that in a moment.) When I say, “This view of death offers some comfort,” I’m not saying, “If you look at death this way, it will no longer trouble you. With this philosophy, you can view death blithely, even cheerfully. The death of the ones you love, and your own eventual death, will no longer suck even in the slightest.”
That’s not what I mean by “comfort.”
When I say, “This atheist philosophy of death offers comfort,” I mean, “This atheist philosophy can, to some extent, alleviate the suffering and grief caused by death. It can make the suffering and grief feel less overwhelming, less unbearable. It doesn’t make the pain disappear — but it can put the experience into a context that gives it some sort of meaning, and it can offer the hope that with time, the pain will diminish. It can give us a sense that there’s a bridge over the chasm; a feeling of trust that, when the worst of the grief passes, we’ll have a solid foundation to return to. It doesn’t make the grief or fear go away — but it can lighten the load.”

I am absolutely not telling you to shut up and not be sad, and I doubt highly that PZ is. It is completely appropriate to be sad when the people we love die — and it’s completely appropriate to say so.

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Coming Out Atheist
Bending
why are you atheists so angry
Greta Christina is author of four books: Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More.

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When Comforting Thoughts Don’t Comfort Everyone
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8 thoughts on “When Comforting Thoughts Don’t Comfort Everyone

  1. 1

    Greta; your post-jump statements make all the points I clicked through in the hope of saying some of the same things.

    That life ends, that death is an expectable part of being alive is stoic, but has a lot of explanatory and clarifying power. It is because of this that having one’s life taken by a preventable disease, by drunk drivers, by moral cretins with AK-47s is such an outrage

    My father is 91, with rather diminishing health etc. My mother died of cigarettes at 44. They were both born mortal, like me. So death is understandable and lacks an aura of divine punishment or reward.

    But there is still plenty of stuff to grumble about, when life is ‘lost’ or stolen where it can, and should, still be enjoyed.

  2. 2

    I’m struggling with this but at the moment I have very few answers for myself.

    if there’s a particular kind of death that can be prevented or delayed […] then of course we should not just accept it. […] There’s a difference between saying, “Death is inevitable” — and saying, “This particular death is inevitable,” or, “This particular form of death is inevitable.” […] Different ideas don’t just help different people — they help in the face of different deaths.


    There is a difference indeed – in fact the difference looms so large, that it’s quite difficult for me to find comfort in the abstract thought about inevitability of death in confrontation with practically any concrete case.

    A young person dies of a disease which we are not able to cure. At the moment we weren’t able to prevent or delay it – there were simply no means available. Perhaps this concrete death could be prevented or delayed – maybe in 300 years we will have the cure. On the other hand, it could be something that for some reasons must forever remain incurable and ineliminable – who knows! If the second is true, then you could call it *really* inevitable. But even so, how can it become a lesser tragedy here and now (for me, for you) just because of that?

    A person dies at the age of 95. At the moment we weren’t able to prevent or delay it – there were simply no means available. Perhaps this concrete death could be prevented or delayed – perhaps in 300 years we will be able to prolong lives considerably (even if not indefinitely). On the other hand, perhaps the age limit will always remain approximately the same. If the second, you could call it *really* inevitable. But even so, how can it become a lesser tragedy here and now (for me, for you) just because of that?

    I’m sorry, I do not mind anyone finding comfort in such considerations. It’s death, it’s sucks terribly, and whatever works for you is *absolutely fine* with me. The thing is just that I find it difficult to understand how it could even start working for me, especially at times when the comfort is really needed.

    At the moment I’m able to understand (well, sort of) how it can help someone to deal with the idea of mortality as such. But concrete people, the beloved ones … I just don’t know.

  3. 3

    Greta, the worst thing about death is having to deal with the irreversible loss of some of the people you loved. You know about that from personal experience.
    The best thing about death is that it is not something that you will ever experience personally, so it’s not something you ever need to worry about it. I don’t think you’ve quite grasped that extremely comforting fact, the sweet power of which can only be true for those of us who have no expectation of an afterlife, no fantasies of moving on to a different kind of post-mortem consciousness.
    I had the painful experience of watching my mother die. And I live with those unpleasant memories. But all my mother ever knew was life. She wasn’t there when her body finally gave out, she was unconscious. She did not experience her own death, she is not now experiencing being dead, she has never had an equivalent painful sense of loss or of her disconnection from me because of her death – all those things can only belong to the living, and she is not living. Her death was not an event in her life, it was an event in mine.
    So my death won’t be an event in my life, it will only be known about and felt by the people whose lives I am no longer part of. I won’t know that I’m dead, so death is not a thing for me to fear. All I will ever experience is being alive, and I won’t know when my life stops, I won’t be able to say “so this is what being dead feels like”, because you can’t BE dead. If you can BE anything, then you are still alive. So as I get older I have become less and less bothered about my own death, because it doesn’t really matter to me when it happens. I expect it will, but it’s not my problem.
    All there is for any of us is life, so get busy living it, because there ain’t anything else quite like it.

  4. 5

    There’s a difference between saying, “Death is inevitable” — and saying, “This particular death is inevitable,” or, “This particular form of death is inevitable.”

    That is a valuable piece of wisdom. Thank you.

  5. 6

    Your article underlines the fact that a purely materialistic explanation for death is inevitably callously mechanistic, because it is the expression of a philosophy, which has no ability to cope with normal human experience. This “normal human experience” is deemed by the advocates of philosophical naturalism to be subjective, and therefore no conclusions about objective reality can be inferred from it. Any attempt to consider that this experience suggests that death is not, in fact, the end, is judged to be ‘irrational’.

    I find this position quite bizarre, because no attempt has been made to ask whether the philosophy of naturalism itself is rational. This philosophy, which requires us to assume that the soul is merely an emergent property of the body, has, in my view, great difficulty in explaining certain basic aspects of reality, such as the necessary objective validity of reason itself, free will (and therefore moral responsibility) and consciousness.

    Because of the nature of ‘soul’, it may very well be that our experience of relating to death at least suggests a reality that transcends the merely material. The assumption that it does not and cannot is mere dogmatism. The belief that there is more to the make-up of a human being than merely the body is dismissed by so called “free thinkers and sceptics” as irrational and sentimental. Of course, “free thought” and “scepticism” can work both ways. I am a sceptic, because I refuse to swallow the dogmatic assertion that the philosophy of naturalism is the only rational worldview, because it fails to explain some of the fundamentals of reality. Therefore I cannot dismiss such ‘sentiment’ as irrational.

    https://aworldworthunderstanding.wordpress.com/

  6. 7

    “no attempt has been made to ask whether the philosophy of naturalism itself is rational.”

    Sigh.

    Allistair Graham @ #6: No attempt has been made to ask whether naturalism is rational in this particular piece, because that’s not what this piece is about. I have written elsewhere, at great length, about why I think naturalism is almost certainly correct — as have many other nonbelievers. I don’t argue first principles every single time I write, because (among many other reasons) that would become unutterably tedious very quickly, both for me and for my readers. This is an atheist blog, and in most of my writing here I take atheism and naturalism as a given, a Reality 101 level that most of the people reading here have already reached, and I take my ideas from there. It’s ridiculous to expect me (or any atheist writer) to argue for the validity of atheism and naturalism in every single piece we write.

    If you want to read my arguments in favor of naturalism, there’s a list of links to some of my favorite posts about atheism in the sidebar, on the left side of the blog. If you want to write comments in this blog arguing against atheism and naturalism, please do so there, or in any future posts where it’s actually appropriate. Please do not derail posts about atheist and naturalist ways of coping with grief. It is insensitive and callous.

  7. 8

    Your article underlines the fact that a purely materialistic explanation for death is inevitably callously mechanistic, because it is the expression of a philosophy, which has no ability to cope with normal human experience.

    Anthony McCarthy, is that you?

    Actually, Greta’s writings have consistently shown a far greater ability to cope with normal human experience than you seem willing to admit. Also, they show far more sympathy and understanding of normal human experience than your tone-deaf off-topic crankery.

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