Homeless man’s funeral

Last night I attended the funeral of a homeless man, who we’ll refer to as Shane.

My church (which, despite the theism, is a genuinely good group by anyone’s standard) was the place that Shane kept coming back to. Any time he showed up, we would do what we could for him – give him coffee, food, a safe place to be for a couple hours. We didn’t have the resources to get him a place to live, but we did what we could do. He sometimes camped on our lawn. We asked him not to, because we got tired of cleaning up his feces, cigarette butts, and used needles… but we didn’t actually MAKE him leave except on the rare occasion his mental health made him potentially dangerous. Most of the time, Shane was super-gentle and self-effacing.

Shane had the kind of mental illness that caused him to communicate mostly in “word salad”. The words usually weren’t connected, either to each other or to whatever he was actually trying to say. Occasionally, though, he would be lucid, and you could tell at those points that this was a pretty intelligent guy. Everyone who’d met him noted that he was generous by nature – often spending his food stamps to buy food for other people, and sharing his cigarettes with people who were feeling even worse than he was.

Last week, Shane died of an infection in his feet. Something that would absolutely have been prevented by him having a home and medical care.

Our church was really the only group that knew or cared Shane existed, so we had a funeral for him, and invited whoever wanted to come – people from the church, people from the neighborhood, people from the nearby homeless camp where he sometimes hung out. We made sure there was plenty of food, and that anyone who wanted could take some with them. We also bought a bunch of socks to be distributed to that homeless camp, to do what little we could to help prevent others from meeting the same fate he did.

One person who spoke at Shane’s funeral was the manager of a nearby gas station where this guy often went for coffee and doughnuts (which she would let him have for free). She’d known him for many years, liked him a lot, and was genuinely weeping for him, and she intends to find out who his family were so she can let them know. One of the things she said was, “He’s in a better place now. No one will beat him up and steal the little he has anymore. No one will push him out of the little shelter he can find anymore. No one will be cruel to him for his mental illness anymore. I’m so sad that he suffered so much, but he’s in a better place now.”

 

But as atheists, we know better.

We know that Shane’s not in a better place. He’s not in any place. His component atoms are already being absorbed by other life forms, but he – his consciousness - just doesn’t exist anymore

And maybe, in a way, she’s not wrong – non-existence might BE a better place than the existence he had.

But he never should have fucking had to exist like that.

We know better than to pretend he’s in a better place and take false comfort from that.

We know that our job is to make THIS world a better place so that other people like Shane don’t have to suffer the way he did.

We know that we need to make a society that ensures everyone who has the ability to work, is able to get a job that pays enough to both meet present needs and allow saving up for future needs and for luxuries.

We know that we need to make a society where people who do NOT have the ability to work are still taken care of. Not pushed from an overnight shelter to a temporary camp to the underside of a bridge to the lawn of a church to the underside of the dirt… but given an actual home, and help to get and make food, and help to keep the place clean, and help to remember to take their meds.

We know that we need to make a society that ensures everyone gets health care, and no one has to worry about how to pay for it.

We have more than enough resources to make all those things happen, and yet we allow the people who are hoarding all those resources to piss it away instead on vanity projects like launching a phallus into the stratosphere.

And most of the country tells themselves this is okay because god. Their god wouldn’t let rich people be rich unless they deserved it, or let poor people be poor unless THEY deserved it, so everyone’s getting what they should be getting already and we don’t have to change anything. Their god will make sure that any injustices in this world will be made right in the next – the evil will be punished and the good rewarded by the only truly objective judge in existence, and that justice is assured and inevitable.

This is why the more religious a person is, the more conservative they are, and the less invested they are in creating a better world or preserving the environment. They don’t feel any need to make this world a better place because, after all, it’s only a very temporary stop on our journey to a better place. No one cares that the airport is a crappy place to be, because we know we’ll get to be in a hotel soon. Might as well ignore the crappy lighting and crappy bathrooms and crappy overpriced food and lack of decent places to nap while we wait for our flight - because soon it’ll be someone else’s problem and we’ll be in a much nicer place. But if everyone knew that the airport was the only place that exists, that there is no hotel or destination afterward… we wouldn’t put up with it being so crappy. When you know that this life is the ONLY one we get, you know that we have to strive to make it stop being so nasty, brutish, and short for so many people.

We must gather the will to make heaven on earth, because it’s the only one that can ever exist.

Our will be done, on earth, as it will never be in heaven.

Otherwise, we are damning more people like Shane to hell for the entirety of their existence.