The week before Fall Break, I learned that my grandma had passed away in a hospital in Beijing. The disease that took her was chronic. Her death had seemed inevitable years ago, and she and the rest of our family had long been preparing for this day. It was a relatively peaceful passing, too, which made it somewhat easier for us to accept.
Still, losing a loved one makes you think about matters of life and death. On the day of her cremation, I had a long call with my mom, and we looked through photos of her on our phones, starting with the more recent ones and working our way back to the black-and-white pictures from the ’60s that we’d digitized from the family albums before I went abroad. I was reminded of how fulfilling and joyful grandma’s life had been overall, and that thought comforted me. “She’s at peace now,” I kept telling myself that night. “She’s with grandpa in a better place.”
But somehow, I couldn’t fall asleep. Something about that consoling image felt incongruous, as if I were trying to shove a pair of earbuds into a case that simply didn’t fit.
That was when I suddenly realized that technically, they couldn’t be in that better place. They weren’t supposed to be anywhere anymore because she and my grandpa were the two staunchest atheists I had ever known. In fact, how pissed would they be if they knew I had just assigned them to a place whose very existence they denied?
I’m sure many nonbelievers nowadays wouldn’t mind going to heaven after death. It would actually be a windfall: who wouldn’t want a free ride to eternal bliss without the toil and demands of religious practice day after day? (Hell would likely be a different case, though.)
Many of us are simply nonreligious in practice without being consistently materialist in how we imagine death. We might not care much about things beyond this world or bother to say prayers regularly. Yet we’d still cross our fingers or occasionally pray to Buddha when we need some extra luck. Some of us can at the same time be ardently spiritual when it comes to tarot and astrology. We also use phrases like “a past life,” “R.I.P.,” “a better place,” and “until we meet again” without necessarily stopping to consider the assumptions these expressions carry about death and the afterlife.
My grandparents were a different species of atheists. For them, everything has a natural, materialist explanation. There’s no God, no Buddha, no ghosts, no heaven and hell, and most definitely no eternal soul and no afterlife. Death is like a blade of grass snapped in half: the moment when everything irreversibly ends. When you die, you’re dead for good. Your consciousness goes “poof,” and your corpse soon begins to decompose.
This realization changed everything. I could no longer tuck myself behind the consolation of my grandparents being in “a better place” — an idea many grieving people reach for without a second thought. I was surprised to realize that I had never really considered what death meant to them, or what death — and the very process of growing old — looked like through the lens of their radical atheism.
Having spent most of my childhood with my grandparents, who took every opportunity to make sure I understood why they considered atheism superior and correct, I knew that their intellectual grounds for it were historical materialism and naturalism — which were probably the picks of most of their socialist-atheist contemporaries as well.
But there were other forces at work, too. Atheism was the dominant (in fact, the only) socially encouraged worldview in China during their youth. In that environment, the vast majority were vehemently against religion in general, or at least claimed to be; even if you weren’t, you’d better keep it to yourself and pray you didn’t get caught worshipping by one of your neighbors.
And maybe there were more personal reasons. Atheism might’ve allowed them greater autonomy, self-determination, and personal freedom — or at least the semblance of them. It also meant saving time, money, and energy otherwise spent on religious activities, and freeing themselves from the commands of local religious authorities.
I suspect this promise of autonomy mattered particularly to my grandparents because of the folk shamanism that prevailed in their rural inland hometown. There, when people ran into trouble, they often used to consult a Shaman — a service that, of course, usually cost — to hear their advice on rituals and medical treatments. I can imagine why young people of their generation, once exposed to a Western and materialist education, would have been reluctant to return to such a state of helplessness and dependency. Maybe that explains why religion entailed backwardness and stupidity to them, why they despised it so much. They were always annoyed when my parents, who have much more accepting views, visited a Buddhist temple to pursue good luck, but there’s nothing they could do beyond dropping a toothless reproach of “feudal superstition!”
But as I recalled more details, especially how they talked about death, I suspected there was something else to it that science, rationality, or social pressure alone could not explain.
Maybe it was also about an aesthetic choice. If nothing else, there was something poetic about atheism through their lens.
Here’s an example. When I was in fourth grade or so, my turtle died. I said during dinner that perhaps he was “up there looking at me now,” simply because that’s something that people say. “I don’t think he’s in space. There’s no oxygen up there,” my grandma corrected me. “But think of this: his body is nurturing the trees and grass around the spot where we buried him. Because of him, they will likely grow taller next spring, as you’ll see.”
I still remember how mesmerizing that description sounded to me when I first heard it. The idea that the dead had not gone somewhere else or continued to watch over me didn’t turn out to be a sad thing. Knowing for sure that my turtle ceased to exist and that his relic has dispersed into the complex landscape of biochemical cycling was somehow even better. It was oddly reassuring and inexplicably beautiful.
There is beauty in facing the indifference and alienness of the universe directly without seeking external consolation. That materialist outlook reveals something reminiscent of mono no aware — a sensitivity to nature’s brutality and to life’s transience and vulnerability.
This idiom brings me to one of my last conversations with my grandpa. It was in 2019, when I visited him in the hospital. My middle school teacher had just given us this assignment of interviewing a family member about their favorite book and writing about it, etc. I hadn’t planned to ask him, because I knew his favorite was one of the brick-thick Dostoevsky novels that would be a nightmare for me to summarize. Besides, I’d already gotten an easier answer from my mom.
Somehow, walking into the hospital made me change my mind. Perhaps I was trying to make him happy by letting him think he was helping me, or perhaps I just ran out of things to say. I brought up the assignment. He thought for quite a long time. To my surprise, he recited a passage from How the Steel Was Tempered, a novel by a Soviet guy Ostrovsky, widely known among his generation but often regarded as an example of political messaging at the expense literary merit — not to mention many had found it somewhat kitsch.
“Man’s dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world — the fight for the liberation of mankind.”
I didn’t like it then, especially the subtext of his reciting those lines. I sensed something ominous in the extent to which that moment felt like a summary.
But ruminating on that passage seven years later, I can finally see some of that materialist beauty in it. Well, it does sound like a 20th century version of YOLO. But the way he was reciting those words from his hospital bed and how they rippled in the empty sterile room still make that moment seem extra profound. He knew his life was finite, and he accepted it.
Now I could taste the mono no aware.
Yesterday, I called my mom again and told her about all of the above: speculations about my grandparents and the small details I had excavated from my memory. She confirmed my interpretation. After a while, though, she added, “Or maybe, it’s just not necessary to read too deeply into it. They were both uncomplicated people, so maybe being atheists was simply how they chose to live a simpler and freer life.”
She had a point. In my desperate need for a cohesive narrative, I had been searching for evidence that grandma still had passed away in peace, even if her version of death was godless. But maybe living a good atheist life does not require you to work out every implication of your worldview. They didn’t need to build a wall of theories around themselves to have lived the way they chose. Maybe they had never thought that much about it at all.
I was the one who was hoping to inherit a sense of meaning and certainty, and I did find a sense of meaning and certainty by considering this entire narrative. It’s my reinvention of their thoughts and ways of living, but I just don’t know if it can ever become my sense of meaning in my version of atheism.
Maybe I needed to borrow it from them simply because I still couldn’t come to terms with the idea of dying an atheist death, and I’m still confused about what it means to me. And I am the one who needs to keep digging.
