A Requiem for the Dying: An Existential Crisis for the Atheist at the End of Life
I met Mary through a volunteer program that matches volunteers with elderly clients who desire companionship at the end of life. I had initially signed up for the program with the intent to reach atheists with the gospel of Jesus Christ. My undergirding premise being that those at the end of life will be more amenable to discussions about death and the afterlife and perhaps more inclined to put their faith in Christ knowing their time on earth is so conspicuously limited. With Mary, I got the first part right. Not so much the second.
Mary is dying. She knows it and so do I. Consequently, I have not had to patiently wade through a great deal of small talk in order to cultivate the type of intimacy and familiarity that would allow me to broach the subject of death and the afterlife. In truth, the very last thing a dying woman wants to talk about is banality. In fact, in just my second visit, Mary brought up the subject of death. As anticipated, she dispensed with the preliminaries and proceeded straight to the lightning round.
I took the opportunity then and there to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. I told her that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that heaven is real and that Jesus Christ, through His sacrifice, paved a way for her to go there upon her death. I informed her that God is offering her forgiveness for all of her sins and that she can be saved by the grace of God alone, through faith alone, in the finished work of Christ alone. She refused to accept this free gift of salvation, both then and in subsequent visits unfortunately. Whenever I share the gospel with Mary she typically listens very politely and then demurs. I keep pressing though. There is far too much at stake to do otherwise. Mary is going to meet her Maker sooner than most.
Mary is 87 years old. She has three grown children and five grandchildren. She was married for 57 years to the love of her life. He passed away seven years ago and while the pain of her bereavement has dissipated over the years, it has never truly gone away and it likely never will. Mary was a high school chemistry teacher for over 50 years. But, that seems like a lifetime ago now.
I visit Mary on a weekly basis at an assisted living facility. The exterior of the building makes the facility appear very much like a hotel or a luxury apartment complex, giving you the initial impression that this might be a nice place to live. But, the interior quickly disabuses you of that notion with a harsh reality that, frankly, takes your breath away. I enter through a lobby and check in with the receptionist after which the receptionist radios for nursing staff to get Mary ready for my visit. She is never referred to by name, she is always referred to by room number. “Lawrence, can you please have Room 1214 ready for her visit?”
I take the elevator up to Mary’s floor. On the wall of the elevator is a list of activities for the day. An episode of The Golden Girls at 3:00 pm on the 4th floor. Bingo at 4:00 pm on the 3rd floor. I reach Mary’s floor and smell the familiar scent of bleach. There is a definite antiseptic quality about this place that makes the ambience even sadder, assuming that’s possible. Nurses, medical technicians, and janitorial staff tend to the needs of their tenants – the vast majority of whom are confined to wheelchairs and unable to complete the most basic of tasks on their own. Mary is no exception.
Mary has become so frail with age and ailment that she can no longer feed herself nor can she bathe or use the restroom on her own. I walk down a long hallway towards Mary’s room, and I pass room after room where I see tenants sitting alone watching television or reading. In the many years that I have been coming to this facility, I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually encountered a visitor. And as lovely as the exterior of the building is and as earnest an effort as the staff members are making to create community and to provide life-affirming activities, the cold hard reality is that these tenants are not living, they are existing. Theirs is not a life. It is barely lifelike. And this makes it difficult for me to come here because this is not an apartment or a hotel. This place is a self-storage unit – for people, not things. Families leave their parents and their grandparents here. Some out of necessity surely, but many out of preference, which gives the place the feeling of death barely warmed over.
But, as depressing as her circumstances are, Mary has always been rather cheerful and optimistic. For an atheist and someone who harbors no expectation for a better life to come, this is puzzling to say the least.
When you enter Mary’s room, you notice two things immediately – an oversized television set and photographs. Lots of photographs. She has photographs of her children, her grandchildren, and her late husband covering every available surface in her tiny one-bedroom apartment. She is seated in her wheelchair in front of her television set when I enter. She greets me warmly as always and we sit and chat. She’s in a good mood. This tends to be her default disposition.
But, a few weeks ago she went through a period of time when she was not her normal cheery self. She was consumed with a darkness and an emptiness that I had never seen in her before. At some point between visits, she had examined her own life and the contributions she had made to the greater good and ultimately found them wanting. Mary, like perhaps most atheists, had poured her life and energy into four things and discovered, in the end, that not only had they failed to alleviate her existential angst, but they dishearteningly contributed to it.
- Children are Not a Means to Immortality or Purpose.
During Mary’s dark night of the soul, I tried to comfort her by reminding her of the contribution she had made in the raising of her children and her grandchildren. By all accounts, her children and her grandchildren are upstanding citizens and positive contributors to society’s well-being. Two of her children followed in her footsteps and became public school teachers while her youngest became a very successful entrepreneur. Her grandchildren excel in school and there is every expectation that they will be very successful in any career of their choosing.
Unfortunately, my attempts to cheer Mary up – grounded in the best of intentions – actually made things worse. This was something I should have anticipated and avoided. The clues to my folly were literally everywhere I set my eyes. Mary’s apartment is overrun with photographs of family. But, they have sadly become a daily reminder of their absence. And a reminder of family is poor succor for those who mourn when their bereavement is caused by the living.
It should have occurred to me that a stranger who visits more than family should not be heralding the benefits of the latter when they give her less attention than the former. Mary, like no doubt many of the tenants in this assisted living facility, had poured her life into her children. But, I imagine, it would be exceedingly difficult to take pride in that or feel any sense of accomplishment or be comforted in a vicarious sense of immortality so close to death when one’s children seldom acknowledge their existence while they are still alive.
Mary quickly brushed aside my reminders of her children and her grandchildren and I belatedly realized my mistake. So, I quickly tried to change the subject.
- All Career Accomplishments will be Forgotten.
I tried to comfort her by reminding her of the contributions she had made to the lives of countless students as a public-school teacher. She latched onto that for a moment, but it became obvious over time that she was not very close to any of her students, and she had not kept in touch with any of them in the intervening years. But determinedly, I pressed the point that surely she had greatly influenced countless students during her five decades as a teacher. But, without concrete evidence of such, I was speculating and she knew it.
It occurred to me then that even with public school teachers who do have an inordinately impactful career, their influence invariably dies when their students do. I barely remember any of my teachers. My children will surely remember none of them.
The truth is that we all may be placed, for a time, in important and prominent roles. But, we are, at best, fingers in a puddle. When pulled out of the water it may ripple for a heartbeat, but just as quickly the eddy is pulled straight. Because none of us are indispensable. The wider world does not need us. Frankly, neither do other people. Not really. Life moves at a dizzying pace and as quickly as we are here, just as quickly will we be forgotten.
There was once a survey conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni which found that “more Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” The survey also found that “more than a third [of respondents] did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place,” and “half of the respondents believed the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 were before the American Revolution.” In 2009, a survey of Oklahoma high school students found that only one out of every four students could name George Washington as the country’s first president. A 2018 study found that 37 percent of respondents believed that Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb, while a full 12 percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower led the military in the Civil War. In 2012, 2014 and 2015 the American Council of Trustees and Alumni commissioned a survey of college graduates and found that one-third were unaware that FDR had introduced the New Deal. Nearly half did not know that Theodore Roosevelt played a major role in the construction of the Panama Canal.
If we are wagering our lives on history’s ability to remember our contributions long after we are gone, we are backing a losing bet.
Furthermore, I am not entirely sure why societal impact is such a big deal for those who refuse to believe in God or the afterlife. Mary has often commented that she believes the afterlife consists of nonexistence. But, if everything in the end does indeed fade to black, then why do we even care if people remember us fondly or remember us at all?
- Leisure is not a Legacy.
I next tried to buoy Mary’s mood by reminding her of the great times she had with her late husband. They traveled extensively together throughout Asia and the South Pacific. Nostalgia, it turns out, does very little to brighten one’s mood. Rather, it tends to serve as an unhappy reminder of what a person can no longer do.
Moreover, times of ease, material comfort, and idyllic leisure, or the memories derived therefrom, do nothing to cure existential angst. If anything, they tend to intensify the crisis. Existential crises and the corresponding therapies to alleviate them are most prevalent upon retirement. People tend to lose a sense of purpose and when death is what’s next, leisure does next to nothing to alleviate the psychic pain. People generally do not want to bequeath to this world a well-rested body. They desire to leave a legacy. And that was ultimately the root of Mary’s pessimism.
- Legacies are Not Meant to Last in this Lifetime.
THE aspirational virtue for atheists seems to be this well-worn desire to “leave the world a better place than they found it.” If that’s the standard, then everybody has failed. In just the past few years, we have experienced a worldwide pandemic, a large-scale war in Ukraine that began with conventional weapons, but will surely not end with them, and now a major war in Israel.
Mary stares at her oversized television set for far longer than perhaps she should. With the never-ending cycle of news, and with news programs earning viewership and money through the sensational, Mary is bombarded with messages decrying the end of the world. As sensational as the news has become, admittedly their apocalyptic predictions are more plausible now than perhaps at any time in recent history.
Mary has, through tears, wondered aloud whether she has left the world a better place than she found it. She has not. By any objective measure, nobody has. Not in any enduring way. We are more polarized along racial, political, and economic lines than perhaps at any other time in history. World War III may be in the offing. If so, that is a conflict that can only end in a nuclear holocaust.
Humanity is bent towards evil. Any positive legacies are momentary in this life. At best, they merely delay the inevitable. Mary is learning this lesson the hard way.
I asked Mary once, “What do you live for now? Do you have any goals?” She responded, “To keep living.” My immediate thought was, “Why?” Mary is not living, she is existing. Why on earth would she want to prolong that? Sadly, it is because she believes this life is all there is. And when this life is the horizon, a person will do anything to prolong it, no matter how bleak their existence.
But, for those of us who have put our faith in Christ, eternity is our horizon. Heaven is where we find permanence and the kingdom of Christ is what we live for now and what we will celebrate forever. And so we live, moment to moment, with the realization that what we do for Christ in this life will reverberate throughout eternity. This life is a vale of tears. It is folly to live for it. The only life worth living is the one lived for the hereafter. And death for the Christian never poses an existential threat. Because of Christ, we have hope beyond the grave.
My hope and prayer is that one day Mary will find that hope. I do believe we are close and I intend on walking with her until death parts us. And as much as she and I like to engage in philosophical and analytical discussions of faith, I do believe that Mary, like most people, will ultimately be won for Christ not through logic alone, but through a love that defies it.