When my mom died, people said about six million different awkward things to me. That's just a rough number. There were probably many more. Some of these things were awkward because people just don't know what to say when someone dies. Most of these things were awkward, however, because of an assumption.
Most everyone except my nearest and dearest assumed that I believed in god.
My mother was one of the most devout, yet one of the most wonderful, Catholics I've known. Usually you can't be good at being Catholic and also be wonderful. The misogyny gets in the way. But my mother had managed to find her way past that in her journey through elementary, middle, high school, and college in the Catholic education system. And she stuck with it. She made her living as a church musician. My childhood home was always vibrating with the strikes of her piano pedals, or the air passing through her glass flute, or her voice echoing off the ceiling fans. We had a family dog that would howl along. I would be upstairs in my room doing homework, reading, or practicing karate and it would be to the soundtrack of Catholicism. The sounds of a cathedral would mix with those of the garbage truck or sprinkler system outside, and suddenly my middle class suburban house was not the cookie cutter it appeared to be. We were a little bit strange.
I was raised in the church myself. As early as I can recall though, I remember going through the motions during Mass thinking, I better do this in case this heaven and hell stuff is real. But it never actually sunk in, I never actually believed it, it never resonated. And it became a real problem once I started doing theatre and made many gay and lesbian friends. I'd have shows Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday matinee, and then I'd go to Mass. And I'd know that everyone around me would be sickened by my friends. I know because they said so. That's how I knew, if you were wondering. It was no longer okay to pretend, to play along "just in case." Because not only did it offend me, but it didn't seem plausible. Sometime in early high school I was able to let go of the fear of it being real once I started reading philosophy and Greek mythology. I couldn't help but see that the early Greeks created stories to explain a world that left them scared and without explanation; what was the Bible, if not the same endeavor?
My mom didn't like that I left the church. But she accepted it. Afterall, she had encouraged reading and learning in our home. She had bought me the books that led me to my disavowal. She became downright supportive after a time. When I was in late high school I fell in love with Mandarin. I took several years of the language in school and while she hammered away on the piano downstairs, I was upstairs humming along while I practiced writing characters. This led her to suggest that I study Buddhism. I checked into it, but it was still too much for me.
Sometime my first year out of her house, at the age of 18, I picked up my first book by Christopher Hitchens. Nothing made as much sense to me as this book. His words led me to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Julia Sweeney and these voices gave me the courage to call myself what I'd been all along: an atheist.
Like coming out in the gay community, this was a defining point. I was nervous and I was committed. I felt alive, yet squashed by the expectations around me.
These expectations were never more present than at my mother's funeral. People I did not know, people who had no reason to assume that they knew anything about me, assumed something huge: that I ordered my life in the same way they did, that I chose the same book they had to guide me through life, that I believed in a place vaguely assumed to be situated somewhere up north where my mother would now be. And if I were to correct them, somehow I looked like the asshole.
I have never attended a funeral and assumed the bereaved were atheists. "Well the good news is, she's not suffering anymore, and that she's just gone. She's not able to see you, or watch out for you, and you don't get to count on seeing her again when you die." I would never say that. Are you kidding me? But that is exactly what I believe. When my mother died, she died. I didn't have any lingering, nagging feeling that she might meet me when I die, and that I better work toward that as a goal. Whenever people said she was watching over me, I resisted the urge to say, "Like, all the time? Because there are definitely more intimate times I'd like her to not see." I like to think that I handled most of these moments with the grace my mother instilled in me, but when someone at my wedding, just four months after my mother passed away, said, "Oh, she's here. And she thinks you look beautiful," I called upon all of the acting lessons my mother had ever paid for and opened my eyes wide. "This is awkward," I started. "But maybe you didn't hear. My mom died about four months ago. She's not here." This of course sent the other party spinning, trying to explain that they knew, but that they meant she was looking down on me from heaven. Obviously. It's when you ask someone to explain something so fantastical, yet that they have thus far assumed to be known by everyone, that shit really gets strange. I recommend it as an amusing way to extricate yourself from conversations you no longer want to be a part of.
My point is, people really thought they were being comforting and helpful. Many people reminded me that they were praying for me. Most everyone, actually. These things only worked to further my stress and anxiety. Not only am I grieving, which for me meant that I was having to think very hard about how to stand up and and remember to shower and eat daily, but I also had to deal with either outing myself and being subjected to a lecture, or how to avoid the issue. But of course avoidance actually only meant that I was avoiding making the other person feel uncomfortable, while I was left listening to someone place upon me a set of rules and beliefs that I have never believed, and that have brought a lot of pain to people I love.
I never told my mother that I was an atheist. But one of the last times I went to visit her in my hometown, we talked religion over lunch. At this point in our relationship, she had watched me walk away from the church she loved, but had eventually said she understood my moral objections to their teachings. She had admitted that she had used birth control, and didn't understand the undue burden the Church placed on women. When I called her crying, telling her that I was getting divorced, and that I was sorry to disappoint her, she said "Well when the men in Rome have daughters in unhappy marriages, then they can tell me what's right and wrong."
And I shared that last part. In her eulogy. Standing next to the altar, across from the seated priest.
To me, that was my mother. Unequivocally tied to her past, to a faith that made her feel at home, yet able to see the trees for the forrest, to use one of her favorite expressions. She didn't like it, but understood my volunteer work at Planned Parenthood. She didn't like it, but she understood my divorce and only wanted me to be happy. And over that lunch the year before she died when we discussed religion, I said, "Do you really think those abortion clinic bombers are going to heaven just because they think that's what Jesus wants them to do? And that they believe in him?" She smiled, shook her head and said, "I don't. The cardiologist who saved my life is Muslim. And I believe he's getting in before those awful people." She looked at me with a knowing glance and simply said, "You're a good person. And that's all that matters to me."
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