You don't lose faith (and here I mean/refer to Faith with a capital F, or maybe that should be faith with a lowercase f-whichever kind we can associate with feelings not involving supernatural entities-the bigger kind, or smaller, depending on where you stand on such matters).
When you lose a loved one or something indelible happens to shake your balance or even shatter your belief that there's anything sensible about this life, you eventually come to a place where the one remaining issue is the only one you can't avoid or get around, and it turns out to be the thing that saves you. You're still alive, you're still around to try and make sense of it. Or, short of that, to keep drawing breath and taking more out of existence than it takes out of you. Just being is winning in the existential sense, no matter how cynical or nihilistic one feels about such matters.
Only until it happens to you, until you get your own death sentence (or, if you're lucky-or unlucky, depending on where you stand on such matters-you die suddenly and unexpectedly); only when your own light is about to be extinguished (forever or temporarily, depending on where you stand on such matters) do you have to confront whether or not you still have faith in how your life has played out.
In my case, my mother's death didn't shatter my faith; I'd already taken care of that matter on my own.
YOU ARE READING
Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone
Non-FictionQuestion: How do you get over it? Answer: You don't. You don't want to. It makes you who you are. Sean Murphy lost his mother days after her fifty-ninth birthday, following a five-year battle with cancer. In this eloquent memoir, he explores his f...
