what I believe

At the memorial service for my grandfather, which was held in a synagogue (out of respect for the wishes of family members other than my grandparents, note), I realized something, or re-realized it, or completed the realization that had begun moments after I got word that he had died:

I don't believe in an afterlife.

This shouldn't have been news: I've never believed in anything like that.  But of course there's belief and then there's belief, and often the beliefs we have are positions taken, in opposition to other people's positions, and it's hard to tell what our statements of belief actually represent—whether they're a larger part statement or belief.  And one thing I can tell you for sure is that my response to the details of traditional religious belief has rarely been entirely level-headed: I feel threatened* by the dominance of the religious worldview in our society, threatened by what strikes me as not just irrational but essentially arbitrary (or, worse, blindly accepting), and so I lash back, attack, I get mad, argumentative.  I protest too much, you could say.  In short, although I didn't think this a few weeks ago, explicitly, my attitude toward the question of a Heaven or Hell, e.g., was just a few degrees too heated and oppositional to inspire confidence as to the actual security of my beliefs.

But so then when I sat there trying to process that my grandfather had died, was dead—and especially when the cantor (no rabbi), not following instructions as closely as I might have hoped, name-dropped God and said something, I don't remember exactly what, about what happened to my grandfather or to his soul after leaving his body—I suppose the emotion outweighed the social anxiety and the combativeness of the alienated or oppressed, and I realized without the usual belligerence or heat that this shit just means absolutely nothing to me.

I sat there trying to think, to get myself to think, "What happened to him when he died?"—and while that struck me and strikes me as a pretty good question, the experience of dying,** I found that the idea that his soul or spirit went somewhere or experienced some kind of [unmetaphorical] transformation just wasn't in the cards, plain and simple—no more than the idea that he has been reincarnated as an octopus, or that he might end up stacking books in my living room or sliming me with ectoplasm like in Ghostbusters.

Do I know for sure that he isn't sitting on a cloud with a harp or pushing a boulder up a mountain while being prodded with pitchforks?  Well, no.  I also don't know that I'm not a brain in a jar or on The Truman Show.  But I found out that I simply don't believe it.  And upon later reflection, I'm glad to have found this out—not just because it's a relief to learn that something I thought I believed seems to be something I actually really do believe (lending me a kind of integrity, not in the sense of character but of unification and soundness of construction—although that, too), but also because, taking it a step further, it leads me to suspect, hopefully, maybe a little optimistically, that maybe I'm beginning to grow up, finally...?

* Not without cause.

** ...but not a great question.  It's always seemed to me that we know what it's like to lose consciousness, more or less, and that although none of us who are alive have ever lost it and then never at any later point regained it, the question that arises there feels like one of those deceptive mind-fucks that serve to create an illusion of a problem where none legitimately arises, like the thing about the three guys who split a motel room for $30 but then get a $5 refund because the room was shit, and they each take $1 and give the bellboy the other $2 as a tip for having done something that, oops, I left out of the story, but so then they each put in $10 to begin with and got $1 back, so that's $9 each or $27 total, and plus the $2 tip that's $29, but so then where the fuck's the other $1??  Yes, to that I'm comparing the afterlife.