Atheists in Foxholes…and Funeral Homes: Where Shall Secular Grief Support be Found?
CW: this blog post discusses child and infant loss directly and death by extension; atheism and secular themes and the potential for religious trauma
This blog post is in editing mode.
By August 2014, I had been long committed to a secular humanist worldview. For much of my life I had vacillated between authenticity in belief (or lack thereof) against the fear of hell and the concurrent need for community. In Texas, especially East Texas, a belief in god, particularly the evangelical one, is as pervasive as “what church do you go to?” in every check-out line.
But when I had my first child, I knew I couldn’t raise them in the same environment that had broken me.
It was a particularly prime moment for secularism and atheism at the time, albeit a largely white and male-dominated discourse. Dawkins and Hitchens were at their zeitgeist, videoed, clipped, memed*, and spread virally (*ironically enough, it was Dawkins who, in his 1976 work The Selfish Gene, coined the term meme). Imperfect, if not altogether harmful, especially in retrospect, they stood as candles of reason for so many who felt lost in the dark wood.
So it was in this online public environment that I entered early motherhood. In 2014, I was trying to balance my husband’s over-the-road trucking job, a testy college course load, two toddlers (one who was medically fragile), and an unexpected pregnancy. I was lonely and I was broke, but I had some online spaces where I drew comfort and support.
And then death came.
I had always had a strange relationship with death. I spent most of my life terrified of it but also weirdly drawn to it (hello, depression). The Christian death ideology never settled right with me: neither heaven nor hell seemed comforting or just. And, as I got older, neither seemed logical.
When my son died in August of 2014, it wasn’t just the first time I experienced close death, it was also the first death I would need to navigate as a non-believer.
There aren’t too many regrets I have about that time, though, certainly, there are things I wish I would have done differently. But Boston’s death, his service, and the early days of bereavement were authentic displays of humanistic grief. His service was fully secular. I didn’t tolerate “little angel” talk or “it’s part of god’s plan” talk. For the most part, those who knew me well knew not to even go there; for the few who tried to anyway, I had a fierce online support group ready to unleash their atheist fangs.
But even the most ardent secular humanists who supported me theoretically and tangibly, they still didn’t fully understand the depth of my isolation. Which, even then I knew, was good. I didn’t want anyone to know what this emptiness felt like.
To have carried a baby, (what we then thought was) the first son after four daughters. To have watched him tumble and grow. To have felt him move. To have painted his name in baseball stripes only to hold him and tell him it was okay to let go at the end of it all.
This tiny thing stitched together in this time and space, a whole ass human, just…gone.
It was a time of strife. I knew, intuitively, how I felt about life and death, and life after death. But there were bigger things: the cosmic nothingness of it all. How to create meaning from a meaningless thing. How to talk to my living children about their dead brother. How to protect them from the potential Jesus talk.
Not to mention the existential dread of it all. And the guilt: that my body had done this to him. That my motherhood was over. None of it was logical, per se, but the feelings were raw and real. The grief–emotional and physical–all-consuming.
But I couldn’t just will it away. I needed to go through it.
And, in that loneliness of loss, I found a place.
In 2009, another brave beautiful baby boy alighted on the world, briefly enough to love and be loved by his mothers. Baby Jude’s death would be the catalyst for his activist mother, Rebecca Hensler, to found an online grief support group geared toward those experiencing loss who desire to do so fully free of religion and spirituality.
In the wake of her son’s death, Rebecca founded an online community she called Grief Beyond Belief. In a 2017 message at afterthought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, Hensler speaks of her son’s life, his loss, and the community she founded in this aftermath. There is something particularly devastating about the loss of a child, and Hensler found compassion and care in online forums, including Compassionate Friends, though she was, arguably, disillusioned by the religious rhetoric others assigned to her child and her own grief. Understanding the necessity of community in the face of loss, but recognizing the trauma that religious beliefs can inflict on grieving non-religious individuals, Hensler founded Grief Beyond Belief.
The community’s webpage platforms countless resources, including a blog platform wherein secular grievers can share their stories and experiences. The webpage is a solid tool page of immediate resources that also points to the main community, Grief Beyond Belief’s Facebook page and its offshoots, including Parents Grief Beyond Belief and Grief Beyond Belief Pet Sector.
The community counts nearing 1000 members. I maintain membership, though my engagement has waned in the decade since the loss of my son (though I do hope to step into the ….). The rules are explicit: Grief Beyond Belief allows for no shenanigans and very little tolerance regarding religion. While it does boast an acceptance of those who question their religious beliefs after loss (something quite common), Grief Beyond Belief remains a stalwart, safe arena for secular humans to process, question, rage, mourn, celebrate love and loss—of all shapes and forms—without the fear of being proselytized, preached to, or further traumatized.
In Grief Beyond Belief, we don’t have to fight or argue or rhetorically debate god, angels, heaven, hell, signs, spirits, afterlives, and so much more that, on the surface, seems like a kindness but is really a cruelty.
In Grief Beyond Belief, I’m just a mom whose baby died. I’m just a person who this thing, this death, happened to. And I get to write that story. I get to determine how I make meaning, or don’t. I get to navigate the loss itself, and the subsequent cultural audacity I’m faced with on a regular basis.
Grief Beyond Belief is a powerful, unique place where humans get to deal with an act of being human … without all the other made up trappings.
Through GBB, I’ve loved and lost Boston again and again. And I’ve made connections with others who I would have never known otherwise. I was able, with very limited support and resources, to process my grief in a healthy, authentic way, and come out on the other side (there were some VERY dark times after Boston died) and go on to contribute, in my own way, to the world around me and to Boston’s legacy.
So, in many ways, Grief Beyond Belief is as much about life as it is about death. We’re just honest about both…right now, not later.
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