NOM

Just want to share a few thoughts in the only forum that will understand. Trigger warning, I briefly mention suicide in this post.

A few days ago a family member lost her beloved pet dog, completely unexpectedly during a routine surgical procedure at the vet. One of the things she said as she is processing this event really struck me: "It's so hard to even make sense of it."

I don't know exactly how she meant this, but I know the phrase and I know how people commonly mean it. Why did this person die so young? Why did they get cancer, or have a car crash, or have a random freak accident? Why did they commit suicide?

I've had these types of deaths in my family. Two uncles who died very young due to extremely unusual events in both cases. In these types of cases, the typical Mormon response is that their "mortal mission" was finished and God needed them for work on the other side. A few years ago my sister committed suicide after a long battle with complex mental illness. Again, she was being made whole on the other side, where she is helping other spirits and where she can continue to influence the children she left behind, by whispering inaudible thoughts into their minds I guess.

But this doesn't work for pet dogs. Why would he be needed on the other side? He's not gonna be preaching, there's no cosmic purpose he needs to pitch in with. So it just leaves an emptiness.

This is one of the benefits my loss of belief in God or an afterlife has given me. I can deal with loss and grief as such, I don't also need to make peace with some God's cosmic plan where everything is accounted for and happens for a reason. It's just biology, it's chance accidents, it's being in the wrong place at the wrong time for no reason at all. The human mind, for whatever reason, strives so hard to have a story for everything. But sometimes the greatest peace is found in letting go of the story.

When the story requires that we believe God would take away some young child’s mother because the almighty God required her service more than that child did, nope, I don’t believe it anyway. Why would God want to use someone who is needed here on earth when he has plenty of people, billions, who lived a full live and learned from all that experience? You would think he doesn’t value the experience of the great grandmother as much as he values the inexperience of a young mother. Nope, any God who prefers inexperience to experience, someone who finished their mortal work, whose children are raised is a pretty stupid God. All the excuses I have ever heard for him killing young people because he needs them, sound pretty dumb. Oh, the young have youth and enthusiasm. Well why wouldn’t the experienced great grandmother have youth and enthusiasm when she is given her youthful body back, or as a spirit? I just can’t see killing young mothers or fathers when children NEED them, when you have a glut of people who really finished their work.

Dogs and cats, well I never needed to blame their death on God. Shit happens and nobody *needs* their dog like a child needs its parents.

I have a friend who lost both parents at a young age, like under 10, and all the *reasons* that God would take them just made him resent a selfish God, or hate a punitive God. They were killed in an accident on Sunday, so there was the blame that they shouldn’t have been recreating on Sunday, as well as “God needed them.”

There really is freedom in “sometimes stuff just happens.” Freedom to be angry about it and rage against the unfairness of it.