you gotta have faith

or something resembling it

I’ve written extensively about death and faith here and other places. I’ve written about my relationship with both those concepts and how they affect my day to day living. And each time I experience the death of someone close to me, I write again, because those concepts are ever changing in my mind.

We lost my cousin Ray this week. I won’t say much more about it except that he was 34 years old and he was loved and cherished and the world will be less without him in it. I had not seen him since his wedding a few years ago, and even though I keep in contact with his mother, my first cousin, I knew Ray these past few years at a distance.

Thanks to a lovely service, I was able to get to know him all over again, and catch up on what his world has been like since we last talked at his wedding. I listened as everyone who entered that funeral home stopped to tell Ray’s mother about the joy they experienced from knowing him. I got to see Ray as a kind, compassionate, thoughtful person, very much how he was a kid. I got to hear about his musical and artistic talents. I saw the smiles on the faces of his coworkers as they talked about him, I saw the tears fall as they mourned him. I witnessed friend after friend file into the room, supporting each other, reaching out to Ray’s family to tell them how treasured he was.

The priest from Ray’s church spoke endearingly about him. He said he’d only known Ray six months but talked about him like an old friend, told us how Ray had become such an integral part of the church in his short time there. He was loved, and loved fully. And he returned that love in so many ways. I could hear and see all that as I sat with my aunt and cousins listening to stories and anecdotes, hugging, shaking hands, accepting condolences.

Wakes and funeral are hard. Any kind of memorial service is hard. But what sustains most people through the trauma of saying goodbye to a loved one is faith. Faith lives them, supports them, carries them through trying times. Their faith in God and an afterlife are the things that keep them going, that comforts them. Faith is a wonderful virtue for those who possess it.

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I don’t believe in god but I don’t not believe in god. That’s the most succinct way I can put it. I try to understand it myself on a deep level but it’s hard to make sense of. The idea of a god that oversees us in heaven is absurd to me. But there’s a part of me that won’t let go of the Catholicism I was raised in, that still says what if. What if there is a god? I don’t discount it entirely mostly because I am wrong about most things in life. What do I know? I can’t prove there isn’t a god as much as you can prove there is. So what do I believe? What can I have faith in if I don’t even know what I believe?

I can only think that there has to be something else. There has to be a some kind of closure, at least. There has to be a final feeling of achieving peace. I want to know that when someone in pain dies, they have a moment where all their pain disappears, where they finally grasp that peace they could not find on Earth. I can’t and don’t believe in heaven as this place where we all gather after death in angelic form. That’s not even what I’m looking for. I want a moment. I’ve lived this whole life of stress and anxiety, I’ve seen such turmoil and remained a decent person through it all so let me have that one moment of blissful peace before I start the process of turning into dust.

I no longer believe in karma as I did many years ago. There’s just not a force big enough to be doling out karma points to everyone on Earth. There’s no Excel spreadsheet in the world that would help keep track of all that. I think - I have faith - that when you die all negativity leaves your body and you are left with a pure version of yourself that you experience for a few seconds (that feels like an eternity) before there is nothing. The very last thing you feel is the inner peace you were never able to find in life. That’s where my faith lies; that in the end you get a small reward for living. And then it goes dark. And that’s ok. Because the light you leave for others becomes part of their faith.

I no longer fear death the way I used to. Sometimes I feel like it would be a relief. Sometimes it just feels like a part of life like going food shopping or graduating high school; it’s just a thing you do. But I hope that when I do go, people remember me the way my cousin Ray was remembered, as someone who bestowed light upon the world.

I have some form of faith. I have to. This world would make me break down without it. I hope you have faith, too.

is it love that rebuilds us all?