Every day that passes, Grandma grows quieter, as though the world around her has begun to dim while an inner world brightens in compensation. She speaks less, reaches out less, and her eyes, once so quick to orient toward a new presence in the room, now drift toward some interior horizon. She is still here—unmistakably, beautifully here—but turned slightly away, as if listening to something beyond my range of hearing. In these subtle withdrawals I see the same gesture Hammershøi captured in Rest: a back turned not in rejection but in transformation, the opening of a threshold that none of us can cross alongside her.
It is in witnessing this slow turning-away that my own belief structure has been tested, stretched, and, unexpectedly, strengthened. I have long lived without belief in an afterlife. I do not imagine heaven or hell waiting past the edge of consciousness. I do not think of angels or judgment or a continuation of self in any literal sense. Yet death, especially death that arrives slowly enough to watch it unfold, presses against these convictions. Not because they are fragile, but because they demand to be lived, not merely reasoned. It is one thing to assert that existence ends; it is another to hold the hand of someone you love as that ending approaches and feel the ache of wanting more for them. Wanting more comfort, more assurance, more continuation than a secular worldview can easily promise.
And yet, it is precisely this tension that has deepened my connection to life. For without belief in an afterlife, I have had to locate meaning here, in these days, in these breaths, in the small gestures of care that shape the vigil. Without a supernatural horizon, the moral and emotional weight of presence intensifies. What I offer Grandma is not a bridge to the next world but companionship in this one. And that is enough. More than enough, it is profound.
In this sense, my beliefs are not diminished but clarified. I believe in rest. Rest not as a euphemism for continued existence but as a culminating state, a final easing of the body’s long labor. Rest is the body’s last truth. The final lyric of a life fully sung. I believe in grace, not as divine favor but as the human capacity to meet suffering with tenderness. And I believe in love, not because it outlives us, but because it saturates the time we are given.
In the days before Grandma retreated into this quiet inwardness, she spoke of visitors: her sister, the children. Someone asked me if I believed they were truly here, waiting to usher her into an afterlife. My first response was no, because I do not imagine such realms. But that answer was incomplete. For Grandma, these visitors are not metaphors. They are companions rising from the deep well of memory, the psyche, the emotional landscapes built over decades. They are the architecture of her inner world. They are artifacts of love, grief, and continuity. And in that sense, they are here to shepherd her not into heaven, but into peace. Into Rest.
Reconciliation, then, is not about refashioning my worldview to fit someone else’s metaphysics. It is about realizing that subjective experience at the end of life is its own truth. If Grandma finds solace in the presence of her sister—real in memory, real in mind, real in heart—then that reality is sufficient. What matters is not ontological accuracy but emotional resonance. She is comforted. She is not alone. And that is a kind of grace I can believe in wholeheartedly.
My vigil has become a kind of prayer, though not in the theological sense. I understand prayer as a form of art: a human craft that transforms fear into form and grief into gesture. Sitting with her, I am shaping my own grief into presence. Into breath. Into waiting. Prayer is not spoken but enacted: a posture of attentiveness. And in this, I feel closer to life, not further from it. The vigil teaches me to see the flame of living not as something fragile, threatened by the dark, but as something self-limiting, something that naturally lowers when its work is done.
This brings me back to the Buddha’s image of the flame. In early Buddhist thought, nirvāṇa is often described as the extinguishing of a candle. A candle not snuffed out by force, but simply ceasing when the fuel is gone. The flame does not “go” anywhere; it stops because its conditions have been fulfilled. This image has settled into me with unexpected comfort. Grandma is not being taken or separated or judged. She is not vanishing into nothingness. She is completing a process. The flame is lowering, thinning, preparing to rest in its own stillness.
Confronting death from within my secular commitments has not weakened them. Instead, it has revealed their depth. Without the cushion of an afterlife, I am forced to confront the full weight of temporality. And yet, paradoxically, this has not made death more frightening. For me, it has made life more luminous. Every gesture of care becomes more consequential. Every memory more cherished. Every hour by Grandma’s bedside more sacred.
My connection to my family has deepened as well. We sit together in the shared labor of love, each of us holding a corner of the vigil. My father’s steadiness, my mother’s compassion, my brother’s presence, even my ex-wife's tender kisses on Grandma's forehead and hands all form a constellation of care around Grandma, a living testament to the world she shaped. In witnessing her life’s last chapter together, we discover not only the depth of our grief but also the depth of our bond.
What Hammershøi offers me through Rest is not an answer but a posture. The turned back is a reminder that some parts of the journey must be taken alone, even by those we love most. But it also reminds me that accompaniment does not require visibility. Sometimes love sits behind the chair, within the quiet, in the steady warmth of simply being present.
In learning to reconcile death with my own beliefs, I have not found heaven. I have found humanity. I have found the fierce beauty of finite life. I have found the grace of turning toward someone even as they turn away from the world and from me. And in that turning, I have found a deepened reverence for living. For its fragility, its mystery, its tenderness, and its final rest.
Coda
In learning to reconcile death within my own beliefs, I have not found heaven, but I have found something grounded and profoundly human: a reverence for life as it is lived and as it ends. Grandma’s quiet withdrawal has clarified what it means to love without needing metaphysics to complete the picture. Her turning-away has drawn me closer—to my family, to her, and to the fragile miracle of presence itself. And if this vigil is a kind of prayer, then let that prayer take its final shape in words as an offering not of faith in the supernatural, but of faith in love, memory, and rest.
As You Turn Away, A Prayer for Grandma
By Dave
May the world grow softer
as you turn away,
each sound thinning to a whisper,
each shadow settling into gentleness.
May the memories that visit you
arrive like familiar footsteps
in a room you have always known.
Your sister’s voice,
the children’s laughter,
all the quiet anchors
of the life you shaped.
May your body find its ease
in the slow unwinding of breath.
May every sorrow loosen
its hold on you,
guilt dissolving,
forgiveness rising
like a warm hand in yours.
May you feel us near,
our vigil steady,
our hearts unhardened,
as we keep the light low
and speak to you
in the language of presence.
And when your flame lowers
to its final glow,
may it do so without fear,
without struggle,
simply completing its work
in the quiet way
a life does
when it has given all it can.
Go gently, Grandma.
Turn toward your rest.
We are here.
We will hold you
as you drift into stillness.
You are loved
beyond measure.
Amen