Construct Reality

Death is an inevitable part of life.  I know this to the core of my being.  Easier said than experienced, however.

Not ten seconds ago, I learned that Wendy Wasserstein died at age 55.  I find myself crying. I am not sure why but I notice that a lot of my contemporaries who have mattered to me intellectually are dying.  

Call it survivor’s guilt, but I look around at people like Wasserstein who is 5 years younger than I, and who has left a young child an orphan, and I wonder why she and not me.  

It’s not fair.

The deaths of popular cultural icons of my youth come at a time when I am questioning my spiritual beliefs in a serious way.  I don’t know what to make of G-d or religion.  Note that my indecisiveness still adheres to the silly superstition of not including the “o” in the spelling of the deity.

I want to believe in an afterlife.  I want to see my parents again.  I’d like to sit down and discuss things with my father; and I’d like the adult me to meet my mother for the first time. I know so little about either of them or their life together that matters.  I’ve been an adult for longer than they were alive but not a day goes by, I don’t think of them.

A friend of mine is convinced that a psychic she consulted was in touch with her dead mother.  Whatever the psychic told her was enough to convince her that her mother is still with her.  My head tells me to be skeptical but my heart feels tremendous envy.  I miss my father and I ache for my mother, even in ectoplasmic form.

Religion is looking more and more arbitrary and silly as I ponder whether souls are palpable entitities or silly superstitious constructs invented by humans to ward off the fear of death.  

Though religion claims to instill altruism and morality, neither has anything to do with it.  That I have known for a long time. Yet I also know that the world is a wondrous place filled with goodness and beauty.  I choose to believe that the goodness and beauty part is innately human nature; though I am aware that the opposite nature exists in equal measure.

What more does religion do then, but promise eternal life?  

As I watch my contemporaries die and wait for the inevitable myself, I realize that life is to be lived and enjoyed.  Regrets are wasteful but hope never is. I still hope; I still dream; I still learn.  

I’d like to believe, I really would but athiests are making a helluva lot more sense than the rest.