Hello, New atheist having a meltdown

[The Grand Nudger]

Welcome aboard.  

IDK if it will help, but look at it in a different light.  You never had any of those things before - and you've made it half a century.  It was always you comforting, guiding, protecting, intervening.  With friends, family, and pets, too.  

Sounds like heaven to me.

But how do you deal with the loss of those beings? 

The same way anyone else does, ultimately.  Regardless of whether a person believes or doesn't, we walk a significant portion of that path in grief and loss alone.  God is one many coping mechanisms, for some, though that belief doesn't uniformly comfort the faithful by any stretch.   I, personally, can find no comfort in the notion - but there are plenty more on display, and the faithful avail themselves of those as well.  

If I had to wager a guess, family ethos can put a person in a poor or strong spot when the inevitable occurs.  I first became aware of it when my great grandmother died.  Everyone packed into a jeep grand cherokee the color of juicy fruit and we drove 1k miles.  She was still alive when we got there.  The place was thick with everyone's rugrats.  She'd been battling cancer for awhile.  She still drug her hard old ass out of bed to make fishsticks for a few dozen of her sprawling brood, lol.  She passed away later that afternoon, from all the stories..she was never the kind of person to make a fuss or ruin a good party, she went out quietly, peacefully, we didn't even know she was gone till dinner.  Not a complete surprise.  I like to think she went out with a smile, the sound of four generations drifting through the air.  We set off enough fireworks that night to raise the dead.  My grandfather deals with grief by blowing shit up.  

I was very young, the finality of the thing was a concept to me, then.  I'd only met her the one time, I only have that single memory.  My mother cried the whole 14 hour trip.  My grandmother was a statue at the wheel.  My grandfather spent the whole ride back telling us every story he could remember..some true, some conflations, some obvious fiction.  He has this peculiar way of smiling whenever he tears up, and a deep sorrowful laugh he interjects every third or fourth sentence.  The best story he told perfectly encapsulating the differences between the two most important women in his life.  It was a conversation they'd had after she flatlined some years beforehand.  Birdie met Jesus!  She'd been to heaven, she'd heard the choir.  She described it all to Peggy, my grandmother, in vivid detail.  She was exuberant..happy.  At the end of all of this, Peggy turns to her and says "Birdie, that would bore me to tears."  

In the middle of all of this, I remember feeling awful.  Not for her loss, she was a character, now, in his meandering stories.  For my mother.  For the inconsolable nature of the situation.  Still a child, and needy and selfish like every child, stuck in a car for the better part of a day..I wanted her attention and she was despondent.  I cried because she was crying.  I hugged her, and I ran my fingers through her hair..I did all of the things my mother did when -I- was sad.  None of that could change the fact that her granny was gone.  I'm tearing up...and laughing nervously, like a certain storyteller, as I recount this.  It's right up at the top of my most painful memories..but it's not even my pain that I'm remembering.  It sounds trite as an adult, but then, what I knew about death was just the one certain thing.  It was the saddest thing in the whole world.  I still think so. 

It was my grandmothers turn over the barrel next.  She'd taken responsibility for her own father, for the last few years of his life.  Years he spent walking all of -his- great grandchildren through the palmetto scrub, or taking us fishing, teaching me to play a dulcimer he'd made for me.  Hunting hogs and letting me pretend I'd took em down with my daisy bb gun.  Pulling the kind of pranks on people only an old man can get away with, looking back at me..winking, me looking up at him in complete admiration.  Telling us even more stories about our parents and grandparents (the embarrassing ones parents never tell children of their own volition).  Telling me stories about WW2.  He'd be the last person in my family to tell true war stories with any regularity, though we've all served.  By the end, he'd long outlived his frame.  He wasn't rushing headlong into the abyss..but he knew that when he blinked out, he wanted to stay dead.  My grandmother couldn't respect those wishes the first or the second time.  She wasn't ready to let go of her father.  He spent a few unnecessary years in pain and the isolation of going mostly deaf, and mostly blind.  The endless privation of time, one indignity piled atop another.   He made it very clear, after the second time..that if she wouldn't let him go he'd wander out into the swamp and find his own goddamned exit.  He never saw anything that he told us about.  It was just lost time, to him..something he'd become very familiar with.  I asked him what it was like once, and he says "Alot like being alive, but without arthritis."  -Pro.

Third time was the charm.  She sucked it up and let her dad go with whatever shred of pride he had left.  Some people regret the time they didn't spend with their loved ones.  She'd come to regret the time she had.  Not because she didn't love him dearly or he was anything other than a solid human being, but because she'd stolen that time..and in the process, stolen something from him.  He'd become a burden to his own daughter.  For a few weeks afterward I'd hop out of bed and run into his room fully expecting him to be in there, getting on his flannel jacket in the middle of a floridian summer to take me out.  It didn't click, it couldn't click...and I'd cry.  It was different this time.  It wasn't -just- other people's pain, seen as an observer.  It was different for another reason as well.  Here was a man who's body had become so weak that part of the reason he always took us with him on his walkabouts..was so that we could help him through the sugarsand.  Inside, though, the man was made of iron.  Crying was the order of the day when Birdie died..but here it was inappropriate.  It didn't respect his memory, it was discordant with who he was, what he wanted.  It fundamentally changed my grandmother.  My mother couldn't bring herself to the wake.

The next few years all of my great aunts and uncles began to pass away.  All of my grandfather and grandmothers siblings.  One after another..and we're a big family.  The writing was on the wall.  We started to expect the inevitable phone call...but that's not what happened.

It was a call from the other side of my family.  My father had died, in a tub full of lukewarm water, at his parents house....complications of medication and the flu.  I hadn't spoken to him or seen him in more than a decade.  Calling me was an afterthought, I was his eldest, but only through adoption...and it had been a messy divorce.  I was quite, calm...very well composed until I hung up.  I ran into my bedroom, buried my face in a pillow, and choked out yet more tears.  I don't think I've ever made a more miserable sound.  My wife asked me what was wrong, I screamed in her face without even trying to, "My dad, my dad, my dad."  It was really just then that I realized I'd been meaning to talk to him someday.  That I had questions.  I was too old to fall into the villainizing trap that a certain kind of divorce and custody arrangement produces, but it was inconvenient to stay in touch and I was young and had a life of my own to deal with.  A sad comment on the matter..was that I was the only one of my sibling old enough to have really remembered him at all.  He coached my softball team.  His real son, my little brother..asleep behind me right now, can only remember his father vaguely and through stories.  

His death redeemed him, however.  The hagiography began immediately.  My mother hadn't said a kind word about him in memory but she's had nothing but kind words since.  None of my friends even realized I'd ever had a father, lol.  If they were under the impression that I'd simply fallen out of the sky and into her lap, they would be well within reason, and she was the person who gave them that impression.  A modern day virgin birth, lol.  I showed up the next day at my Nana and Dot Dots (his parents).  I wasn't entirely welcome, and no one expected me.  His death, in and of itself, was a surprise.  He'd made no arrangement, left no provision, and no one in his family was in a position to recover his body and pay the fees for it's final disposition.  His father was completely broken.  I thought that -I'd- made a miserable sound..but it was nothing in comparison.   He wasnt breathing so much as groaning, an impossibly heavy stone on his chest.  He would be dead within months.  His wife right behind him.  The death of my father gave me a sense of urgency, clarity, I needed to take control of the situation. I needed to make sure that his estate was properly handled.  I needed to be certain that my mother was finally made whole if there was any way for me to do so.  I needed to know that his son got closure and a piece of his father in death, even if it never materialized in life.  I needed to make sure that his daughter got his ashes and had all the time she needed to part with her daddy.   She'd been the only one of us who kept up with him.  So that's what I did.  I stuffed all of that down and the  initial scream into the pillow and then at my wife was all that ever escaped from me on his count.  Business business business.  I was the grown up now.  The only man in the room.  I had to act like it...because if I didn't.....I would be back in that jeep, crying because other people are crying, not knowing what to do.

More than you asked for...but there it is.  A small description of how many people in my family have handled death over the past four decades..how I came to learn to handle it.  No two people in that story have or had the same beliefs about gods...or practically anything else.   The one thing we all agree on, though..is that we want our deaths, ideally, to be more of a party than a funeral.  More play, less work.  I want to drive this beater till the wheels come completely off.  I want to go out like Birdie, and face it like Warney.  I have to acknowledge it, to face it in life, or my children will be forced to face it when I'm gone as I did with my father.  In death I might even overcome some of my shortcomings in life..If I play my cards right.  I cant outlive my children, like Dot Dot and Nana did..because I won't survive that anymore than they managed to.  I'll probably live much longer than I expect (and far longer than I'll be comfortable with, by the end).  My own grandparents aren't aging so much as petrifying.  My grandfather is supposed to have been dead any year now from his own various ailments for as long as I've been alive.  The man is a walking cocktail of steroids and he's hard as a coffin nail already.  Guys in his 80's...but I wouldn't wanna get into a drunken brawl against him.  Too mean for heaven, to warm for hell..I suppose.  Ideally, most of my remaining loved ones will deal with -my- death..not the other way around.  My mother is young, she was a teen when she had me, there's significant overlap in our circle of friends, hell..shes always been my best friend.  Brute force of demographics suggests we're likely to live and die pretty much together, save a few years at the end.  I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Still, the prospect of my grands death is terrifying.  Utterly, unabashedly, and completely terrifying.  The world will be an objectively shittier place without them in it, together. No amount of them being in some better place..if there is such a place, will change that fact.  I would sooner burn this world to cinder with everyone in it than be apart from them.  When their lights go out...I'd consider turning all of you motherfuckers out the party in pure, unfiltered rage..if only for a moment.  Can't be a party pooper, though, can I?  They will die.  They know it..I know it...it's not a remote prospect.  I'll have to dig real deep, and hopefully combine alot of what I'd learned up above.  Make sure they have their dignity, make sure that all parties are made whole.  Take the time to cry into a pillow.  Tell stories in between fits of nervous laughter and smile through tears.  Keep silent when others need the space to sound out their own grief.  Console those who once consoled me.  Reassure those who will watch me die one day. Have nothing but good things to say. Show up. Let them go. Be the good son.  The good father.  The good man.  A good life, a good end.

That's how I've done it, and how I hope to do it better each time....culminating in my own end.