Just pointing you to another in NPR’s series “Losing Our Religion”–today’s story centers on dealing with tragedy, without religion.
The series–and this story–focuses on just a handful of individuals’ stories, which is both nice (in that it allows for a richness of detail) and frustrating (in that a small sample will necessarily not represent the views of a great many in a varied population). And as always, the comments are worth diving into, both for touching stories and for knee-jerk tribalism. It being NPR, the level of comments is significantly more intelligent than, say, CNN or Fox. Actually, the comments there add quite a few more perspectives, fleshing out the small sample size of the story itself. If you have your own stories, feel free to post them here as well as there.
For myself, I linked to this one, which some folk have already requested for use at their own funerals.
How do I deal with tragedy? I take a short moment to rail at randomness then I get on with the business of dealing with what must be dealt with. When our younger daughter was 12 she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma… Cancer. My only religious thought was “too bad there’s not some higher power that could fix this for the asking”. Then we got busy and did all of the doctor-hospital-modern medicine stuff and she’s now 27 and healthy. No prayers necessary.