My Counterfeit Affair with God
Illustration by Katie Hillier
I don’t believe in God, but don’t tell him that.
When my grandmother was dying, I would lay on my back, wrapped in the hot pink bed sheets she bought me, staring at my Vietnamese paper lantern hanging from the ceiling and “praying” to God to spare her.
“God if you take away Nana’s sickness, I’ll do anything you ask. I won’t even ask Santa for any gifts this year.”
If you’d asked me the next morning, as the hours of pleading hung on my breath, if I believed in God, I would say, “No. If God were real, he wouldn’t have let Roo die.” Bold talk for a seven-year-old who couldn’t decipher her lefts from rights. Roo, our family dog and a purebred Weimaraner, was much more than a pet, he was my mother’s soulmate. Before my mother had me, Roo was her child. She sang him nursery rhymes as he perched in her lap like a cat curled up for an afternoon nap. They were Siamese twins who paved their own unique form of attachment. If you ask, she will never hesitate to talk about the night Roo returned to her, standing in his spot at the foot of her bed, watching her, listening to her restful breath, and then vanishing as quickly as he appeared, just as she opened her eyes and called out his name.
I remember her recalling the celestial memory most recently with tears violating her eyes and her lips lightly quivering as they assembled the words, “In angel form, he returned to me. My beautiful boy.” I now see Roo’s death as a warm-up for my grandmother’s passing, who only a handful of years later would follow Roo to a better place, in her angel form.
In the darkness, the colourful Vietnamese lantern looked bleak and grim, like a cemetery in the dead of winter. Despite its stillness, I watched its lifeless aura as if it were a forewarning and would selfishly ask God to spare my grandmother. I can’t help but wonder what lonely element of my despair made me feel the need to reach out my hand to a higher being that I had no faith in and ask for him to grasp it back in return. This was the beginning and end of my unreciprocated affair with God. A reaction and coping mechanism I still don’t fully understand.
On November 26th, 2006, my counterfeit prayers were neglected. My younger brother and I spent the morning of the 28th sitting on the marble kitchen counter constructing get well cards with illustrations of birds for my grandmother - her favourite. My mother walked through the front door almost unrecognizable. She shuffled across the wood floor, unable to support her frame that appeared as if it could melt away at any moment. Her grief oozed out of her like puss from a wound, hanging in the air like stale breath. My grandmother had died of lung cancer two days prior. My first thought was that we made these cards for nothing, that she would never see them or never need them. Then like a physical force, it hit me where it hurt, where it burned, where it ached. I remember only small fragments from that day, tiny shattered pieces scattered throughout my memory. The most colourful and vivid piece of memory was me asking through wistful tears for my father, as he held me on his hip, to walk me to the large glass windows that overlooked the backyard. I wanted to cry up to the sky and reach my hands up to the heavens, up to Nana, up to the God that I knew wasn’t there. I recall that day not being completely clear, as the blue and light grey from the clouds marbled the sky. I hung to the grey parts with my eyes and wailed up to the heavens, calling for my Nana and for all my wasted prayers to return to me.
After her passing, I took down the Vietnamese paper light hanging above my bed. I swore the beads hanging off the end were swaying in the stillness of the air like a ghost was moving them. As I know now, and as my mother said to me in a soothing voice, my eyes were playing tricks on me. I wanted so badly for it to be Nana, but the thought of a ghost’s presence was paralyzing. Staring at the bare lightbulb and feeling the hot tears as they tickled my cheeks and collided with the hot pink sheets, I feel now as if someone is tracing their finger down my face as I write.
Once again, I would pray and plead to the God I knew wasn’t there, but this time to bring her back. My relationship with God, if you would call it that, only grew stronger and more bizarre, as my faith in him faltered the more I would ask of him. In the pit of the fire that burned inside me, I firmly believed God was selfishly keeping both Roo and Nana in heaven as angels to bid his dues, while simultaneously having no faith that he was real. I never understood why I kept coping with my grief by talking to someone I never believed was listening.
Today I identify as an atheist, not because God never answered my prayers as a little girl but because I am on the side of science and fact. In my eyes no benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God would allow for horrors like the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide to occur, so therefore to me, he can’t exist. That is my own opinion, however, and everyone is entitled to theirs. I admire people that place so much faith in God, though I cannot function that way. My grandmother’s death was as real as anything I had ever experienced at the age of seven, and how I manifested my pain by kicking and screaming at the sky laying on my back like a cowering dog, I will never understand.