My mom believes in some kind of religion, I do not. We both know this, she can believe whatever she wills but sometimes she doesn’t take kindly to me being a non-believer, especially when she drinks. Anyways, the story is is that We were arguing and she brings up faith, she flips out at me for not believing, and blames everything bad that’s happened in the family on me not believing in god. I got defensive and, rightly or wrongly, I pushed the issue.
I gave her the arguments that convinced me what I used to believe in just wasn’t. That God isn’t moral, and didn’t make a moral world. That what you believe in is more about were you happened to be born in rather than some theological choice. She asked me if I believed in an Afterlife, and I said I didn’t. That’s when she got really upset. She said that what I was saying was then when she died, she would just be nothing, she would just rot in the ground. I told her that this is what I believed would happen to me, everyone, you live and you exist and you die and you don’t, I wasn’t trying to slight her, I really wasn’t.
She wouldn’t have it. And she started crying, hysterically weeping. She said that I was telling her that she’d never see her dad and all the family she’d lost before, that I was saying all the people she had loved and had loved her so much were dead and gone forever, that they couldn’t watch over and she couldn’t see them. I felt bad, maybe I pushed to far, maybe their was no way for me to know, but what she said later struck me the most.
She told me how she wanted to go on. She told me how much she didn’t want this life to be the end, because this life has not been too kind to her. She told me she didn’t want to be a nothing, she didn’t want to just rot in the ground. I knew exactly how she felt. I remember being petrified when I lost faith, petrified of death, how final it was, and how timeless non-existence would be. I couldn’t take it. Something tells me that what I did shook her belief, if only for a moment, and she felt the same terror I did.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse about something I’ve ever said to her, ever.
