My grandmother (I only ever met one of my grandparents) died several years ago. In one sense we weren’t very close in the end, because by then we lived thousands of miles apart and only met once a year, and I’m not very good at keeping in touch with people who are far away from me. But at the same time we cared about each other, and she was dear to me, and I still miss her.

Recently I’ve found myself thinking about her more often than I did previously, in the few years just after her death. Because I keep thinking about how she would have loved to meet and hold Ingrid. And despite the utter improbability of it, I like to believe that somehow she can still see us and that she occasionally looks in our direction and smiles at Ingrid and me.

As I said before, I’m an atheist, and I think the likelihood of a God is infinitesimal, and the likelihood of an afterlife of any description is only marginally greater. But there is nevertheless something that gives me “belief in hope beyond reason”, to borrow an expression from Scott Atran (quoted here in the NY Times). I have no reason to believe that my grandmother still “exists”, but I cannot help thinking and hoping that perhaps somehow she does, after all.

Perhaps it is because I cannot imagine what it is like to be dead. My grandmother always existed, how can she suddenly not be?

From the same NY Times article:

We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues.