Did My Peace Lie in Spirituality, Religion or Science? Trying to Cope with the Death of a Friend
By Lucy Griffiths
Death is an unexpected visitor, and grief is the house guest that just won't leave. Sometimes loss hits you like a train to the gut at 8 am on a sunny Tuesday morning, the recipient and the messenger of the heartbreaking news blubbering on the phone for five minutes in disbelief and pain. My friend was dead. What was I meant to do now?
Weeks and months can pass by without the train ever ceasing its route through your stomach, and if you were the kid that grew up with no clear conception of the afterlife, then there is no way to ease the intensity of the wide aching tunnel carved through you. Death brought me face to face with my value sets and belief systems, which I realised consisted of absolutely nothing.
When she died, I grasped at bits and pieces of values about death that those around me had, desperate to imagine my lost friend in a field of milk and honey, with angel wings or in the earth around me. All of these cushioned, beautiful images in my head didn’t jive well with my pessimistic world outlook. How do I conceptualise the fact that someone who had been there in physical form one moment, wasn’t there the next? I began to search for an answer that would satisfy my innate human craving to know the unknown. Did my peace lie in spirituality, religion or science?
I always existed under the assumption that psychics are most likely expert manipulators well versed in the art of reading body language. I had a roommate at the time who swore by his psychic, and when I came home with mascara down my face and inconsolable hiccupping sobs, I was convinced that it was worth a try. She sent me a text back saying she was booked up for the foreseeable future. The next morning, however, she sent another message telling me she had an opening and that she felt I really needed it. Twenty minutes later, I had de-puffed my eyes, put on a shirt free of snot and removed any tear-stained pillows from the camera’s view.
I couldn’t bring myself to bring up the subject of the death I had experienced, yet halfway through she pulled a deck of tarot cards that signified loss. She interpreted this and told me that if it had not happened already, my sister was going to call and tell me someone had passed away. It was spot on. I would like to think that I had my pain well enough, and even if I didn’t, she spoke of the call in such detail that the chance of her guessing would be small. Throughout the rest of the appointment, her predictions and words were vague enough that they could be interpreted and connected to anyone. I could see myself doing some mental acrobatics to relate to her words. But the accuracy of her depiction of the call haunted me long after we hung up, one accurate shred of vulnerable truth amongst blanket statements.
Growing up in a white middle-class community, the religion I have been most exposed to in my life is Christianity. The second is Buddhism (a version adapted by crystal-bearing white women). Christianity believes in heaven and hell, the entrance fee to a peaceful afterlife hinging on certain moral requirements. My friend was good and bad, like every human being. The only value that has been a constant in my life, amongst this storm, is that no one is wholly good or wholly bad.
This, among other reasons, made me scrap the idea of the Christian model of heaven and hell for my dead friend. Buddhism on the other hand is about reincarnation. What is often misunderstood by the whitewashed Buddhism I grew up with is the adaptation of positive attributes with the idea of reincarnation. Nirvana is the state achieved with the elimination of greed, desire and ignorance that denotes the end of the reincarnation cycle.
According to Buddhism, then, I should desire her to no longer be on this earth – to no longer be in a body experiencing life on this planet. That to me is incredibly painful, maybe even worse than imagining her having to live life in a world such as this all over again. It is not my place to adapt to other people’s religions, but I found myself searching for meaning and answers in every place I could find. Both religions have beautiful aspects, but none spoke to me.
Maybe Buddhism was right about some things. The law of conservation of energy claims that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form of energy to another. Most mainstream scientific theories don’t support the idea of reincarnation, but it has attempted to measure the soul. Through my grief, I have grasped ways to prove that she was here, she existed, and that she was more than a bag of bones and blood; that she had a soul.
The infamous 21 grams experiment initially appeased my search. The experiment executed in 1907 by Dr Duncan MacDougall concluded that the soul weighed approximately 21 grams. This was allegedly measured by weight before and after death. Not only was his conclusion based on only four patients, but only one patient lost weight after death. Furthermore, in his experiment with dogs, zero out of fifteen showed weight loss after death (meaning dogs had no soul, which is heinously incorrect).
Science attempts to disvalue religious and spiritual beliefs. And while I have no innate inclination to believe one over the other (and respect both), once again, science did not resolve the loss that I felt surrounding her death. In fact, I am certain she would be rebelling against anything this scientist claimed to know after she heard his conclusion about dogs.
All that I have found in this journey is that death is truly and completely as horrendous and confusing as it seems. Death robs you of comfort, serenity and sense of self. Sometimes there is no closure. Someone that you love is simply gone. They could be sending you psychic messages, possibly wandering the earth in a reincarnated form, maybe even existing in a space that fits into the human understanding of heaven.
I found no answer. I did, however, stumble upon a place within myself to store her within my mind and heart, a space where she continues to live through me. Grief is shell shock, dunking your head under ice water, free falling. However, how you conceptualise death and pain is a personal journey, one you never quite know how to take until it happens. As I discovered different forms to experience and rationalise death and the afterlife, I saw bits and pieces that she would have both loved and hated. For her, I do not choose one straightforward belief.
For her, I create my own spiritual realm, my own religion, and my own scientific method. The world keeps on spinning no matter how much you expect it to end when the train hits you. Life will never be the same, but beautiful things can still grow and thrive. Hope is never truly lost.
Lucy Griffiths (she/her) is an English major at the University of Victoria. She will consume nearly any kind of literature, from gas station romance to speculative fiction. She grew up writing stories of monsters and fairies and has now moved on to exploring other genres as she tries to make sense of the world around her.