How To Be An Agnostic
In the period after her death, though, my mind changed.
What I had not expected was the way my ‘dead’ mother was
present to me for months, and then years. For a long time,
I was very conscious of what she might have said or felt in a
particular moment. Some people who lose someone close, like a
lover, fi nd themselves talking to the person who has died, and
eventually fi nd a kind of happiness in doing so. This was not
so for me. Instead, I had dreams in which my mother lived on,
though in a kind of parallel universe. I would recognise her but
also recognise she was becoming different. What this made me
realise is that I would not get over her death; it would always
be with me in some shape or form, and that was, in fact, good.
I did not want to forget her, and not doing so entailed pain.
But I would learn to live with it and even, possibly, live a little
Illus. 6.2: It is better to think that God is a monster than that the problem of
evil can be solved – the message of Job?