Searching for Hope in Discouraging Times

 presented at the Melrose Unitarian Universalist Church on October 26, 2025

Story for All Ages: Methuselah and Hannah (a true story)

Thousands of years ago, the valley of the Jordan River was known for its palm trees. The Judean palm could grow as tall as 100 feet. And it produced a delicious fruit, called dates. 

Judean dates were sweet and delicious, and they stayed fresh for a long time. So every camel caravan that went through the desert wanted to have a good supply of Judean dates.

But a lot can happen over the centuries. The climate changed, wars were fought, people chopped down trees for firewood, and eventually there were no more Judean date palms. 

For centuries, everyone believed they were gone forever. But then, about 60 years ago, archeologists found an ancient fortress overlooking the Dead Sea. Inside the fortress they found a jar, and in the jar they found some seeds. Seeds that hadn’t seen the light for two thousand years. 

For about 30 more years the seeds just sat in that jar or were studied in a lab, because nobody believed a seed that old could actually grow. But eventually a botanist took on the challenge and planted some of those seeds. They didn’t all sprout, but some did. One particularly hardy plant she named Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Bible. 

Date palms, it turns out, have genders, just like people do. And being a male, Methuselah couldn’t produce fruit by himself. So the botanist planted some more of the seeds, and eventually grew a female date palm that she named Hannah (named after the mother of the prophet Samuel).

It took several years for Hannah to get old enough to bear fruit. But just three years ago she did, and people got to taste Judean dates for the first time in hundreds of years. They were just as delicious as the old stories claimed. 

Now, most people who tell this story focus on that persistent botanist, or maybe the archeologists who found the jar. But just for a moment I want you to look at this story from the point of view of the seeds that became Methuselah and Hannah. 

When they went into that jar, they probably expected to be planted the next season, or maybe the next year. They didn’t know anything about a changing climate or wars or firewood. They didn’t know they were inside an abandoned fortress or that they had gotten buried under the desert sands. They certainly hadn’t expected to sit in that jar for two thousand years. 

But they didn’t give up, and when they got their chance to be planted, they were ready and they grew. And because they did, their whole species is going to come back.

There’s something to learn from Methuselah and Hannah. Very often, people will tell you that you can’t do something you feel you need to do. You can’t do it now. You can’t do it yet. Maybe you can’t do it until you’re older, or until you’re an adult, or until the world changes in some unspecified way. It may seem like it’s never going to happen.

But if you don’t forget, if you keep your purpose in mind and you stay ready, you never know when your time might come.

 

First reading: "Hope is not a bird, Emily, it’s a sewer rat" by Caitlin Seida 

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost


When you need it most.



 

Hope is an ugly thing


With teeth and claws and


Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.



 

It’s what thrives in the discards


And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,


Able to find a way to go on


When nothing else can even find a way in.
 

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such


diseases as


optimism, persistence,


Perseverance and joy,


Transmissible as it drags its tail across


your path


and 


bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,


Emily.


It’s a lowly little sewer rat


That snorts pesticides like they were


Lines of coke and still


Shows up on time to work the next day


Looking no worse for wear.

Second reading: "The Only Answer I Know" by Elea Kemler

[lightly edited]

 

In my town, the annual harvest fair is a big event. All the groups in town have booths. The Boy Scouts make root beer; the Women’s Club offers homemade pies, and the Rotary gives out hotdogs for a donation for the food pantry. My church sells whoopie pies: you can mix and match your choice of flavors for filling and cake. The dance school and karate students perform, and there’s a band. It’s a rite of passage when kids are old enough to walk around by themselves and collect swag and candy.

Last year I sat at our booth next to a sign saying, “The Minister is In. Profound Questions Answered, 25 cents.” Some of the questions were from people wanting to know their purpose or the meaning of their life, which is not something you can really answer for someone else. I had to extemporize, saying there may be multiple purposes to our lives, or that we can’t know the full meaning of our lives because we don’t always know how our lives touch other people.

A few people asked me to predict the future in ways that were surprising and tender. They wanted to know if the heart surgery would go okay or the cancer would return or their husband would recover from his stroke. I prefaced these answers with the disclosure, in the name of professional honesty, that I am not psychic but I also said in every case, “I absolutely believe it is going to be fine, more than fine.”

I can’t know this for sure, of course, but what I do know for sure is that hope matters. One of the best things we can do is to hold hope for someone when that person cannot hold it for themselves. Not the careless, casual hope of “I hope things go well for you,” but a sturdier hope, a hope which says, “I believe in you even though you might not believe in yourself right now.” A hope which says, “I see you as whole and brave as hell, even though you feel broken and afraid.”

It is, I realize, an act of great trust to sit down with the local minister and ask a true question — a question of the heart—because the questions are also our fears, our worries, our deepest longings. I will hold the questions as carefully as I can, like the gifts they are, and offer hope as the only answer I know.

 

God of all who long for answers in this time of great fear and uncertainty, help us to hold the questions with tenderness and to offer one another a sturdy, faithful hope.

Sermon

When people find out that I write a political blog, and that I've summarized the news weekly for the past 17 years, they almost always say the same two things. First: "I could never do that. The news is just too depressing." And then later: "Tell me something hopeful." By which I think they mean: "Say something optimistic. Tell me it's going to be OK."

Whenever I hear that request, I am reminded of an old joke: A man goes to a therapist and says that he’s been feeling dispirited. And the doctor tells him: “You are in luck. The great clown Pagliacci is in town. He is so amusing that if you go see him tonight, I’m sure you will forget about your troubles.” Rather than being comforted, the man bursts into tears. When he can speak again he explains: “But doctor, I am Pagliacci.”

Well, I’m Pagliacci too. In other words, I don’t stand above or outside the news. I see the same things you do, and they affect me too. I’d like to think I know how it’s all going to come out, but I don’t. 

If you had asked me a year or two years ago, I would not have predicted we’d be where we are. And that should make a person humble about looking a year or two or three years ahead. I can map you out a scenario where everything gets better from here. Maybe things started to turn around last weekend with the No Kings protests. Or maybe we’re in a darker scenario, where these are only the early stages of a long downward slide. Is one of those outcomes more likely than the other? I have no idea. 

So this morning, rather than speculate about the future, I will try to stick close to what I know, which is that right now we are living through discouraging times. 

I used to live in Chicago, so it really hit me a few weeks ago when I saw video of men in military-style uniforms, wearing masks, and carrying guns. They were marching down the Magnificent Mile
in broad daylight. And they were not some extremist militia, they were the government. I never thought I’d see that.

Maybe the discouragement hits you in other ways. Maybe you’ve noticed that the already woefully inadequate steps we were taking to mitigate climate change have all been reversed. Or that we’re shutting down medical research, and ignoring much of the research we’ve already done. Maybe you’ve noticed that children in poor countries are dying because USAID can no longer pay for food or immunizations. Maybe it’s the Justice Department turning into a tool for personal vengeance, or the Supreme Court debating whether the Voting Rights Act is going to continue to mean anything. Maybe you’ve heard Russell Vought say that he wants to terrorize government employees, and you know — either from your own experience or from someone you are close to — that he’s been doing a fine job of that. Maybe someone you work with or count on or care about for some other reason has left the country, either by deportation or simply out of fear.

These are discouraging times. It is hard to live hopefully. And yet, hope is a psychological necessity. To live without hope is a very bleak life indeed. 

And so I am tempted — as I suspect you are too — to defend my hope in ways that in the long run may not be all that wise. Because the news is so depressing, it’s tempting to stop paying attention, counting on the evil of the times to stay out there somewhere. Or we could go all-in on optimism, and seize on every scrap of good news as a sign that this moment, right now, is when it all turns around. 2026 will be just like 2018 and 2028 like 2020. We survived this before, so we’ll survive it again. 

And maybe that’s right. But what if it isn’t? Optimism can be brittle. In discouraging times, work inspired by a optimism — work on demonstrations, on political campaigns, even work on a blog like mine — can become increasingly panicked or obsessive, and can result in despair if the future refuses to cooperate.

So what I want to talk about today is how to make our hope — both our personal hope and our hope as a community — more resilient. How can we cultivate the kind of hope that can survive setbacks? The sewer-rat kind of hope with “patchy fur that’s seen some shit”. 

We know this is possible because people and communities have endured far worse times than these without losing hope. I’m thinking of Nelson Mandela spending 27 years in prison, or Elie Wiesel surviving Auschwitz, and of both the Black and the Jewish communities living through centuries of oppression. 

Hope that is firmly rooted and well constructed can be very resilient. How can we build that kind of hope for ourselves?

Let me start by defining what I mean by hope. We often use “hopeful” and “optimistic” as synonyms. But I think that’s part of the problem. Optimism is a prediction about the future. But I see hope as an attitude towards the present. Hope says that right here, right now, striving is worthwhile. And the opposite of hope is not pessimism, it’s despair, a feeling that nothing is worthwhile, nothing makes a difference, nothing matters. 

To make this very concrete, for me as a blogger, hope is believing that it is worthwhile to try to figure out what’s going on in the world, and worthwhile to tell people about it. You undoubtedly have your own things that you’re trying to do in your life, and if you came to the conclusion that none of those things were worthwhile, then why would you do them? Why would you even bother to get out of bed in the morning?

There are people for whom hope comes easy. It just seems to be wired into their souls. In The Book of Hope, the great naturalist Jane Goodall describes hope as a manifestation of the life force. Simply to realize that she was alive, to Jane Goodall at least, was hopeful.

Not all of us have that. Some of us need to root our hope in something more specific than simply life itself. 

In good times, in encouraging times, you can root your hope in a very immediate kind of optimism: Something is worth trying because it’s going to work. Hope and optimism can form a virtuous cycle: You try things because you’re confident they’ll work, they work because success comes easily in encouraging times, and as you develop a record of success, you get more and more confident. 

But in times like these, optimism can backfire. It can cause you to make promises to yourself that are not fulfilled. I tell myself I’m going to write this post because it will go viral — but then it doesn’t. Or I’m going to participate in this demonstration because it’s going to change everything — but then things don’t seem that different. Or all the sacrifices I’m making for this candidate will be worth it when she wins — but then she loses. 

Make yourself enough unfulfilled promises like that, and before long you may find yourself in despair: Nothing works. Nothing matters. Nothing is worth doing. 

So that’s my first suggestion for maintaining hope in discouraging times: Don’t promise yourself success. 

In discouraging times, you strive not because you know something will work, but because you don’t know that it won’t work. You’re not making the world a better place, you’re giving the world a chance to be a better place. You give readers a chance to share your post, you give neighbors a chance to organize, you give the country a chance to elect a good candidate.

Whether any particular effort bears fruit or not, it’s important to keep giving the world chances. Because if nobody does that, things will never improve.

I sometimes anchor this for myself with a baseball analogy. Imagine that you come up to bat in a situation where you can either win or lose the game. Optimism tells you that you will get a hit and win. Pessimism that you will make an out and lose. 

Despair tells you not to try, because what’s the point? If you can’t just forfeit, stand there and watch the pitches go by. But a hopeful attitude, the one I would like to have, doesn’t picture an outcome at all. I’m going to take my swings, not because I know I’ll succeed or fail, but because I don’t know what will happen. The future isn’t promised either way; it will emerge from us taking our swings. 


The most important thing not to promise yourself is a timetable. Now, every good plan has a timetable, and the plan to save American democracy certainly does: Raise consciousness with ever-larger demonstrations. Take back one or both houses of Congress next year, then the presidency in 2028, and then work to undo a lot of the damage being done right now. That’s Plan A, and it’s definitely worth our effort. 

But we can’t be sure that it will work. We’re already seeing the regime’s plans to rig the congressional map, and to make it harder for marginalized groups to vote. Maybe their plans will work, and we’ll already be off schedule next year. If your hope was tied to that schedule, then you may jump to the conclusion that it’s all for nothing; democracy is doomed. 

But it isn’t, not really. 

We don’t usually look at things from the other side, but it turns out that maintaining a long-term autocracy is hard. When I was younger, Latin America was full of military dictatorships, but they’re all gone now. A bit further back, Spain and Portugal had fascist regimes, but they couldn’t outlast their founders. Hitler’s thousand-year reich lasted only 12 years, and even the Soviet Union fell eventually. 

The idea of democracy can stay alive for a very long time. No matter how long things go badly, like a seed in a jar, it may yet sprout when the time is right.

That’s a hopeful statement, but it’s rooted in something far more vague than the 2026-2028 timetable. Maybe it’s rooted in faith in the human spirit, or in the power of ideas. The very vagueness of it is what makes it resilient. 

I’m pretty sure that Nelson Mandela wasn’t planning to spend 27 years in prison. If he had a timetable in mind, that wasn’t it. But he had faith, he stayed ready, and he waited.

And that brings me to my final piece of advice: Cultivate faith in something larger than yourself, and root your hope there. 

I know the word faith is problematic for a lot of UUs, especially the ones who (like me) grew up under an oppressive theology. In the church where I grew up, faith meant submitting to someone else’s ideas about God and what God wants us to do. 

But that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about rooting your hope in something that may be too vague to rigorously define and too big to gather data on. In The Book of Hope, Jane Goodall finds hope in the resilience of Nature, and points to Methuselah and Hannah as evidence of it. 

So maybe you have faith that Truth eventually wins out, or that Love (in the long run) outlasts Hate. Something like that you can never verify in a laboratory.

Personally, I believe that people have hidden depths. In some seasons, like this one, unsuspected quantities of selfishness and fear and resentment erupt out of those depths and cause far more damage than we may have imagined was possible. But there will be other seasons, when unanticipated courage and compassion erupt from those same hidden depths, when ordinary people find themselves standing up to tanks, and the tank drivers run away rather than run them over. 

Such things have happened before. I’m not going to promise that it will happen next month or next year or any particular time. But it will happen again. I’m pretty sure of that.

So my point isn’t to tell you that you should have faith in this or that, but that if you look deep inside yourself, you may find that you do have faith in something, something that you are just not able to doubt. Maybe if you doubted it, you wouldn't be you any more. And when you find that thing you trust, whatever it is, that is where you want to root your hope. A hope that is rooted in an unshakeable faith will stand up to whatever happens. 

I want to close with a poem: “First Lesson” by Philip Booth. There are many interpretations of what Booth’s “first lesson” really is. But as I read it, the father is teaching his daughter the importance of learning to trust things that you either can’t see or can’t keep your eye on.

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

So that’s the thought I want to leave you with: If you can find the sea that you trust to hold you, you need never lose hope. 

Life After (somebody else's) Death

a service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy
May 4, 2025

Opening words 

“To love is to risk your life.” - Salman Rushdie

Story: Milk for the Queen
I adapted this story from the Buddhist tradition.

Once there was a great Queen, and her son, the Prince, was the most precious thing in her world. In her heart, she believed that no one had ever loved a child the way that she loved the Prince.

So when the Prince got sick, the Queen sent for the kingdom’s best doctors and said to them sternly: “If you love me
 or fear me or hope to gain my favor, you will make my son well again.”

But all the doctors’ efforts failed, and the Prince died.

The Queen was distraught and could not be comforted. In her heart she believed that no one had ever felt such a grief as she felt now. No one had ever felt so alone, so bereft, so hopeless.

But then she remembered that on the edge of the kingdom was a mountain, and in the mountain was a cave, 
and in the cave lived a hermit. Many stories were told about the hermit’s great wisdom, and it was said that he had magical powers, perhaps even the power to raise the dead.

So the Queen sent soldiers to bring the hermit to her. She promised him his heart’s desire if he could restore her child’s life, and threatened terrible punishments should he fail.

But the hermit had passed beyond desire and fear, so the Queen’s bluster did not move him. But his compassion responded to her suffering, so he offered hope. “There may be a way. Long ago, a teacher far wiser and more powerful than I devised a ritual which, it is said, can restore the dead to life. But I have never seen it performed, because its ingredients are so difficult to obtain."

“I am Queen,” the Queen responded. “Whatever I require will be brought to me. Tell me what you need.”

So the hermit made a list of many rare and exotic items. The last thing on the list, though, seemed far too simple: a cup of milk. “But not just any cup of milk,” the hermit explained: “You must go out alone and borrow it from a household that has never known grief.”

As the Queen expected, her vast resources allowed the other ingredients to be collected quickly. So she left her courtiers behind and went out to borrow milk.

At the first door she came to, a woman was only too happy to offer milk to her Queen. “But I must know,” the Queen demanded. “Has this household known grief?”

“It has,” the woman answered. “My mother died seven years ago, and yet I talk to her every day. I ask her advice, I complain about my own children, and sometimes I just ramble about my day. I know she is not really here, but I talk anyway, because I miss her so much.”

This milk, the Queen realized, would not do, so she moved on.

At the next house, a man told the Queen about his brother. “I knew him all my life, and I never imagined I would have to live without him. But now I do.”

So the Queen moved on.

At the next house, a man mourned for his wife, and at the next a woman remembered her best friend. And so it went, house after house. None of their milk could satisfy the ritual’s requirement.

As the light was fading and it became time to return to the palace to try again in the morning, the Queen made one more attempt, stopping at a poor hut.

The woman who came to the door lived alone and took whatever work she could find, barely earning enough to feed herself. Nonetheless, she offered the milk, which the Queen suspected might be all she had.

But what about grief? The woman had once had a son, about the same age as the Prince. When she spoke of him, she somehow both smiled and cried at the same time.

Her stories led the Queen to tell her own stories about the Prince, and the two of them talked for a long while, 
until they were both crying and holding each other like sisters.

And then the Queen understood what the hermit had hoped to teach her by giving her this task: There would be no death-defeating ritual, because there was no household that had never known grief. Love and death and grief care nothing for queens, they come to everyone. And the feeling that she had imagined was hers alone in fact was shared by every member of her kingdom.

The realization that the Prince would not be returning started the Queen crying anew. But eventually she returned to the palace, let the hermit go back to his cave, and began organizing the largest funeral the kingdom had ever seen. And she reserved a special place of honor for all the people whose milk she could not use.

After the Prince’s funeral, the Queen went on to live for many years. And though she never stopped missing her son, what she did with those years became the subject of many other stories.

Readings
The Christian writer C. S. Lewis kept notes on his thoughts and feelings after his wife died, and they were later collected into a short book called A Grief Observed. He wrote:

Kind people have said to me, “She is with God.” In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable. But I find this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief.

Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings.  Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them — that is, in earthly life — they appear as … two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for.

You tell me, “she goes on.” But my heart and body are crying out, “Come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature.”

… Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

The second reading is from Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff

Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that.

It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. If I had forgotten that hope, then it would indeed have brought light into my life to be reminded of it. But I did not think of death as a bottomless pit. I did not grieve as one who has no hope.

Yet Eric is gone, here and now he is gone; now I cannot talk with him, now I cannot see him, now I cannot hug him, now I cannot hear of his plans for the future. That is my sorrow.

A friend said, “Remember, he’s in good hands.” I was deeply moved. But that reality does not put Eric back in my hands now. That’s my grief. For that grief, what consolation can there be other than having him back?

Sermon

A year and a half ago, I gave what at the time I thought was a very ambitious talk, called “My Humanist Afterlife”. I took on the  problem that the late UU minister Forrest Church had said was central to religion: “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die”.

One popular response to that problem is to postulate an afterlife, so that Death is not truly an ending. That talk examined not just whether I believe in an afterlife (for the most part I decided that I didn’t), but what alternative beliefs do I have and how do they deal with the underlying problem?

Looking back, it’s now obvious to me that there’s a very big hole in that talk: It was all about my own death. How do I cope with being alive and knowing that I will die? How do I tell a meaningful story about my life, 
one that motivates me to get up in the morning and take action, when it’s possible that my story might get cut off at any moment, and whatever I had been trying to accomplish might come to nothing.

Looking back, I now see that I only addressed part of the problem. Because the point of postulating an afterlife is not only to make peace with our own deaths, but also the deaths of the people we build our lives around. How can we dare to love someone and put them at the center of our lives, when we know they could be taken from us at any moment? And when they are taken, how do we go on?

Life has a way of pointing out your oversights. In early December, my wife Deb died. She always came to Quincy with me, and many of you knew her. She had had a number of health problems over the decades, but her death seemed to have nothing to do with any of them. All three of her previous cancers were undetectable. She seemed only to have a routine intestinal bug, the kind where you say, “If this doesn’t clear up over the weekend, maybe we should call your doctor.”

Friday morning I thought I was letting her sleep in. But when I went up at 11 to wake her, I couldn’t. The EMTs came and told me she was dead. No advance warning, no lingering decline. She was with me Thursday night, and gone Friday morning.

I’m not the first person to make the mistake of discussing Death in a self-centered way, as if  my own death were the only issue. The Greek philosopher Epicurus said: “Death is nothing to us, because while we exist, Death is not here. And when Death comes, we will not be here.”

And that’s a wonderful explanation of why I shouldn’t fear my own death. But when I was trying to wake Deb and couldn’t, Death was there and so was I. It was an experience well worth fearing.

So let’s go back to the problem of Death and look at it not centering on our own deaths, but on the death of someone else, maybe someone we love very, very much.

Religious notions of an afterlife claim to help with this, because they allow us to picture our loved ones living on, perhaps watching from Heaven and waiting for us to join them.

There is an important difference between life after your own death and life after someone else’s death. If there is no life after your own death, you’ll never know. Your belief or lack of belief will never be tested.
 
But life after someone else’s death is undeniable. Maybe you never will have to live on after the death of your spouse of 40 years, as I am doing now. But as the story recounted, everyone, at some time or another, 
loses someone they care about. So we also need to evaluate afterlife beliefs from that point of view: Can we believe that our loved ones live on? How might that belief change our experience of grief? Does it help?

I don’t want to create an artificial suspense, so I’ll cut to the chase: My experience of living on past Deb’s death has not fundamentally changed my conclusions. It hasn’t sent me running back to the Christianity I was raised in, or started me believing again in the immortality of an immutable soul.

I remain skeptical of the notion of a soul in general, which I deconstructed in that previous talk. When I look back on my own life, I don’t see all my memories as instances of some essential “Me”. In my previous talk, I ended up reframing my “soul” as a ship of Theseus. That’s the festival ship that the city of Athens kept seaworthy for centuries by replacing parts as they wore out, until not a single original plank remained. Theseus’ ship has become a metaphor for all those things that have day-to-day continuity, but not long-term identity. So I identify with the person I was yesterday, but not necessarily with the person I was when I was 10. I don’t see the eternal soul that is supposed to unite us.

Likewise with Deb: Was she the same person last December as she was when we met in 1980? Honestly, I hope not. I’d like to believe that our time together changed us both in more than superficial ways.

However, there is one part of that talk that looks different from this point of view: the idea that we live on in the memories of others. I didn’t take much comfort in that when it came to my own death, because most people’s impressions of me don’t seem that accurate. And as it turns out, the person who knew me best didn’t outlive me.

But our loved ones do live on in our memories, and I think it’s important to honor that. The way I imagine empathy works is that we shape parts of our own consciousness to resemble the people we deal with. And people who are important to us get modeled in considerable detail.

That’s why just before you call your mother with some news, you can already guess what she’s going to say, right down to the tone of her voice. Those pieces of ourselves don’t die when the people they’re based on die, and there’s no reason they should. You can still make a good guess how your mother would respond to your news, and those may or may not be conversations you want to keep having.

I do want to keep having conversations with Deb, and so I do many things that resemble what a believer in a literal afterlife might do. I talk to her when I’m alone. I have a small shrine around the urn of her ashes. And so on. But I do those things mainly because I don’t want to kill off a valued piece of myself.

One reason I haven’t been tempted by a more literal view of Deb’s afterlife is that I don’t believe it would help. Believers often imagine that they will be comforted in the moment of grief. But when Death actually comes, that promise is often not fulfilled, as C. S. Lewis and Nicholas Wolterstorff discovered.

Their accounts confirmed for me an observation I had made after my mother’s funeral, which to me seemed designed more to shore up the survivors’ Christian faith than to comfort us in our hour of grief.

To me, the most attractive feature of Christianity is the vision of an all-knowing God who sees through all our posturing and denial and yet loves us anyway. So we don’t have to pretend to be lovable. To God, we are lovable.

But the death of a loved one threatens that vision, because the all-knowing God who loves us must somehow be reconciled with the all-powerful God who did this to us. Rather than save our loved one or take us at the same time, the all-powerful God has left us here to suffer. What kind of love is that?

And so for the Christian, grief is often compounded by an additional burden: a crisis of faith. Perhaps that is why so many Christian funerals seem more concerned with doctrine than with the life that has ended or the lives that go on.

Immediately after Deb’s death, when I tried on the idea that we would meet again after my own death, I found something similar to what the readings reported. What occupied my mind to the exclusion of all else was not the future or eternity, it was now. I found that a reunion in Heaven was only comforting if I also imagined that something would kill me by the end of the week. The thought that I might have to trudge through another 20 years or more without her — tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as MacBeth put it — it was such a horror that nothing I could imagine on the other side of it made the slightest difference.

I remember how much stress my Christian teachers laid on eternity, and how our earthly lifetimes are but an eyeblink, insignificant in the face of eternity. One thing I can testify to is that in moment of grief, all that turns around and goes inside out. The person you love is gone, and you don’t want to be together in eternity, you want to be together now. It is the vastness of eternity that seems insignificant in the face of now.

Couple that with my previously expressed skepticism about my unchanging eternal soul. The Me who eventually reunites with Deb — who is that guy? During the last six months, my soul’s ship of Theseus has been through a shipwreck and a repair. Now picture two or three more decades of wear and tear and replacement parts. When I finally sail that ship into my eternal port, how recognizable will I be?

So no, I haven’t found an afterlife vision that would comfort me even if I could believe in it.

But you know I can’t end there. As always, I don’t think it’s enough to critique what I don’t believe, because religious beliefs are created to solve human problems. And those problems don’t go away just because you reject the beliefs that were supposed to solve them.

So: We love people, and sometimes they die. What are we going to do?

I had about as bad a case of this as you can imagine. It wasn’t just that Deb and I had been married for 40 years. During that time, we were the central focus of each other’s lives. We didn’t spread our bets by having children. We had friends, but we could go weeks at a time without paying attention to anyone but each other.

So after she died, it did not take long to realize that I was not really an individual, and I had not been one in a very long time. People would ask me what I thought, what I liked, what I wanted, how I do things, and those questions just confused me. I knew what we thought, what we liked, what we wanted, and how we did things. Who was this “I” they were asking about?

It’s hard to describe the sense of dislocation you feel when you realize that you are alone, but you are not an individual. There’s a deep feeling that you don’t belong in this world. If you belong anywhere, it is in the grave with the person you love. As Shakespeare has Marc Antony say, “My heart is in the coffin with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me.”

Whether or not you want it to come back is the first serious question grief poses. Do you really want to keep living? The Stoic philosopher Seneca lacked our modern taboos against suicide, so he posed the question directly. “The door lies open,” he wrote. “If you don’t want to fight, you can flee.”

But we do have a taboo, so we seldom talk about this option. Few bereaved people take direct action to kill themselves. And yet it’s not uncommon for one spouse to die a few months after the other. Death from a “broken heart”, as we sometimes say, is often a death from self-neglect. Why should I bother to eat or get out of bed or take my medication?

Pretty early on, though, I knew I wanted to live. The last thing Deb would have wanted, I was sure, was to be the cause of my death. Just a few months before, we had seen a play that imagined Romeo and Juliet as an older couple. Their double suicide plays out, but in a different way: Juliet commits suicide to avoid the late stages of a debilitating disease. Romeo finds her body and then kills himself.

We talked about that play afterwards and agreed that Romeo’s suicide didn’t make a satisfying ending. It’s all very romantic when you’re 15 to imagine that someone just couldn’t go on without you. But when you love someone as a mature person, that’s not what you want for them. I would have guessed her opinion anyway, but I was lucky enough to hear her say so.  Deb wanted me to live, and realizing that was the beginning of realizing that we wanted me to live. I wanted me to live.

But that realization just leads to the next questions: Live how? Live what? The life I had built with Deb simply didn’t work without her. It was broken. I was broken.

I was lucky enough to have friends who propped me up while I learned to walk again. Knowing I had their indulgent support, I could afford to be harsh with myself. My mantra those first few weeks was “Do the hard thing.”

That first night they told me, “You don’t have to go back to the apartment by yourself.” But I answered, “Yes, I do.” That Sunday they told me I didn’t have to make an appearance at church. I didn’t have to light a candle and tell the community what had happened. “Yes, I do.”

On Monday they reminded me that I didn’t have to write my weekly blog; everyone would understand. But if I stopped, I wondered, when would I start again? Could I count on being better in a week? Two weeks? Ten weeks? I wrote the blog.

I knew I didn’t have to speak at Deb’s memorial service, but who else could do her memory justice? It took a lot of rehearsing to get through that eulogy without breaking down, and my voice did crack a couple of times, but I made it.

When this talk got scheduled, I wondered if it was still too soon. Maybe I should talk about something completely different, like Trump’s first hundred days. But once this topic occurred to me, it filled my mind. I couldn’t not do it.

So I don’t know if I would call this advice, but it’s what I’ve been doing and it seems to be working: Find people who will catch you if you fall, and then don’t be afraid to fall. Go straight at your grief. Do the hard thing.

So after you’ve decided that you want to live, after you’ve started to regain your individuality, you face a third challenge: What do you do with your past? And here, I find, there’s a narrow path to walk between two traps.

One trap is to let the past overwhelm the present. You freeze as much of life as you can and turn your home into a museum. Going forward, whatever you find to do with your life is just an epilogue to the story that ended when your loved one died.  

The opposite trap is to let it all go. Live in the moment, and if thinking about the past causes you pain, don’t. Get rid of anything that might remind you. That was then, this is now. Move on.

Having had nearly half a year to contemplate those options, I don’t think either of them works, even on its own terms. 

I have come to believe that it does not honor the past to turn it into your prison. In the same way that I’m sure Deb would not have wanted to be the cause of my death, I also believe she would not have wanted her death to suck all the juice out of my life. My sadness, my depression, my brokenness — that’s not the legacy she would want.

But putting it all behind me to live in the moment — I don’t even believe that’s the right way to live in the moment. Because the present inexorably turns into the past. This moment, right now, will soon be part of our shared past. And if the past means nothing, then what meaning can we trust here and now?

For me, that insight got crystalized in the old Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” Each verse recalls some peak experience of life, and finds it disappointing. In one verse, she remembers: “We were so very much in love. Then one day he went away, and I thought I would die, but I didn’t.”

You can hear the disappointment in her voice, as if surviving just proved that she’d been a silly girl to imagine love meant something. She lost her love, and she didn’t even die. Is that all there is? To love, to life, to anything?

So this is where I’ve gotten to after six months. I want to live. And like the Queen in my story, I don’t want the time I have left reduced to epilogue. I want these remaining years to be the subject of many other stories.

But if I want those new stories to mean anything, I have to keep telling the old stories of me and Deb and our forty years together. I loved her very much, and I lost her. Like Peggy Lee, at times I thought I would die. And I didn’t.

But that’s not all there is.

Closing words
Sing with me, sing for the years
Sing for the laughter and sing for the tears
Sing with me, if it's just for today
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away.

- Aerosmith “Dream On”