I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember the shift. It happened sometime in my early teenage years. Before then, I was religious. Christianity gave me a warm answer to a cold question: what happens when we die?

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Faith

There was comfort in faith. You live, you die, you meet God. Death wasn’t scary. It wasn’t really a thing to think about at all. Not deeply. Until it became one.

At first, it started with something very small. I’d pray and notice that the silence felt more like absence. Then I started noticing the patterns. The neat, structured explanations. The way the rules were always human-sized.

The deeper I thought about it, the more religion felt man-made. Not in a dismissive way. In a terrifying way. Because if it was man-made, then there wasn’t someone listening. There wasn’t someone waiting. That meant… death might actually be death.

That realization landed with the kind of force only teenage angst can carry. Everything around me still looked the same, but something had snapped inside. The idea that this—this life—might be it... it hit hard.

(I sometimes wish I had someone to talk to about it back then, but I didn’t even know how to start that conversation)

Rage

Like many fresh atheists, I went through the righteous anger phase.

In late adolescence and early adulthood, I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and a slew of similar books. They provided structure for what I was already starting to feel. That structure felt empowering. Maybe too empowering.

For about a year, I was annoyingly militant in my atheism. I wanted debates. I wanted arguments. I felt like I had been lied to, and I wanted the world to know. I’ve since mellowed. But I still remember the clarity and intensity of that feeling. Part clarity. Part panic.

Now

These days, the topic of mortality keeps resurfacing. Partly because of a book—More Everything Forever—which discusses attempts to escape mortality. To outsmart death. Digitally. Biologically. Whatever it takes.

But also because of my son.

He’s five months old now. Watching him, I’m struck by how much life he has ahead. And I’m also struck by how finite my own path is. I’m older now than my dad was when I was born. I used to think life was a long line. Now I see it as two overlapping arcs. Mine is still rising, but the slope has changed. His is just beginning.

I don’t want to leave. That’s the hard truth. I don’t want there to be a time when I am no longer. Writing this is painful, but maybe writing through it is the only way forward.

(Writing has helped me face other hard things. Maybe it’ll help with this one, too.)

Gift

Here’s something I didn’t expect: thinking about mortality made me feel more powerful, not less.

Not powerful in a control-the-universe kind of way. Powerful in a responsibility kind of way. I gave life to someone. That’s enormous. And now, every time I look at my son, I understand how staggering the gift of life is. Not metaphorically. Literally.

I can’t pretend I’m at peace with mortality. But I can say that I’m more aware of its weight—and its twin: meaning. We die. Which is precisely why living matters.