Console her with the Atheist’s philosophy:
____Never mind! Your grandma’s dead.
It’s Nature’s way of denoting an atrophy
____In the muscles, lungs and head.
I mean to say her central nervous system
____Was gradually shutting down.
You really can’t appreciate its Wisdom?
____Oh, darling, must you frown?
For when we too are old and in our grey hairs,
____We shall start to senesce.
And that’s when all our trials and all our past cares
____Shall slowly evanesce:
For darling, they were nothing but illusions
____Of an over-active brain!
And that’s from whence does stem this sad confusion
____About Hope, and Fear, and Pain!
They’re really nothing more than mere self-interest
____Of that selfish, selve-ish seed:
And that’s why, dear, I must admit that it’s best
____(I mean for the human breed)
That your granny’s not around to clog the action
____Of the great genetic pool.
She got seventy years, and now it’s traction
____Has snapped back: that’s the rule.
For really, what’s the point of all the dying,
____And the old, sick, halt and lame?
Oh, darling, you must cease from all this crying!
____Worship Darwin and his name!
Samuel Johnson lives in Richmond Hill, Ontario, and works for the L’Arche Daybreak community.
Exactly. “Console” her with the atheist’s philosophy. Works equally well in fox-holes too, I’ve heard.
Take a photo of the late Charles Darwin
Who buried God at his daughter’s death.
Look at a photograph of dead Walt Whitman
Whose lines became so long and grandiose and bilious and, literally, self-centred without recompense,
He lost his breath.
Each likeness is a living body quote.
When alive, they’d often gain applause.
Their white beards now are like the books they wrote —
Accepted with a childlike innocence —
like Santa Claus.