The Worst Loss Imaginable is Why This Atheist Believes in the Soul

Jacqueline Dooley
5 min readJul 5, 2021
Photo by Jacqueline Dooley

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.

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Jacqueline Dooley

Essayist, content writer, bereaved parent. Bylines: Human Parts, GEN, Marker, OneZero, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Pulse, HuffPost, Longreads, Modern Loss