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The Worst Loss Imaginable is Why This Atheist Believes in the Soul
I noticed the first Northern Cardinal a few months after my daughter died. It was shockingly red. It landed in one of our dead ash trees (a tree that fell, with an explosive crash, last September).
When I saw the bird, I thought, Ana is sending me a sign.
Death came with me everywhere that year. It lingered at the threshold of all the doorways in this house where Ana had grown up. I lingered too. I wandered through the house, feeling barely alive, looking for signs of her — feathers, coins, heart-shaped stones. I begged her to visit me in my dreams.
I made my husband drive me around so we could follow the rumbling and brooding sky, hoping to see a rainbow.
When I finally saw one, I took a triumphant photo. I uploaded it to Facebook and was confronted with a dozen rainbows as bright and perfect as my own.
My sign was everyone’s sign. The rainbow proved nothing.
Proof. That’s what I craved. I needed proof that she wasn’t completely gone, that her soul still existed.
Birds, stones, coins, feathers — I searched for them with feverish determination. I needed something to believe in that was bigger than myself, something that atheism had never given me.
