See For Yourself: such is life

Tomorrow morning I'm flying up to Providence to help clear out my Great Aunt Mary's house. Her health has been deteriorating ever since she was hit by a car while walking across the street a couple years ago, and she's going to need to be in an assisted living situation for the rest of her life (she's 89) so we sold her house. Nobody tell her that I'm posting a picture of her in her nightgown. She'd be mortified.

Great Aunt Mary, me, and my sister Megan
Mary's house in Providence, RI
Summer 2005

Her sister, my Great Aunt Agnes died Tuesday night at the age of 96, so there might be a similar trip to New York City soon to clear out the apartment where she's lived by herself since the 1950s up until a few days ago. With whatever NYC's rent control laws are, she was paying like $800/month for a great apartment in a nice Manhattan neighborhood with a view of the Hudson. I imagine her death will be a celebrated occasion for her landlord.

For the family, it was obvious that it was coming soon, and she was at peace with facing the end, so everyone is okay with things. The only sad part is that she wanted to die at home instead of in the hospital, and didn't make it back to her beloved apartment. She had a pretty amazing life, and was very sharp until the end.

It would appear I don't have any good pictures of Agnes on my computer. Here's the best I can do.

Great Aunt Agnes, Aunt Patty, and Wife Kira
Annapolis, MD
Christmas 2006

In other news, this post should partially explain my lack of blogging lately. We've been very busy preparing to put our house on the market. The good news is that today the new carpet was installed. With the freshly painted walls, this place looks pretty good. Now a few minor fix ups and some cleaning and we're ready to sell.

I want to mention this excellent post by PZ, which in no way fits with the rest of this entry. It is his list of 12 objections to religion. All twelve are important, though his last one resonated most strongly with me:

Faith. Faith is the greatest sin of religion. I despise it; I'm particularly appalled that it is so universally regarded as a virtue. Listen, if I ever call someone a "person of faith", you should be aware that I have just insulted them terribly. It's astonishing how easily that sails over people's heads, though.
Faith is this amazing idea that it is a good thing to hold incredible beliefs in the complete absence of evidence to support them; the more outrageous the belief and the weaker the logic behind them, the stronger your faith and the more virtuous your conduct. It short-circuits everything that works in the world and puts ignorance on a pedestal.
Faith is the opposite of science, yet it is also one common element that you will always hear valued in religion. It is the number one most common excuse for holding peculiar superstitious beliefs in spite of the evidence against them, their violations of sense, and their foundation in wishful thinking and rhetorical vapor—it's the one word non-answer to every criticism of religion. Faith. You might as well just say "gullibility" or "ignorance" or "delusion"— it's all the same thing.

Another good point on his list that seems particularly relevant to me right now is this one:

Theft. Atheists know this one on a daily basis: Tornado demolishes home, tearful survivor comes before news cameras and "thanks God" that she was spared. Football player scores goal, drops to knees and praises god for his touchdown. Cancer patient goes into remission, lies in bed surrounded by his expensive, highly trained medical team, calls it a miracle. What religion does is steal human accomplishment and bestows it on a fickle imaginary being. Modern medicine is not a product of religion, it's the highly refined outcome of years of empirical science, yet people still babble about miracles and prayers.

The one thing PZ might have added was that religion tends to steal the deceased's thunder at the memorial service. I don't know what the plans are yet for Agnes' memorial, but she wasn't a religious person and I hope I don't have to sit through a bunch of Catholic crap just because her family is religious. She considered herself an agnostic ("I don't say there's no god. I just say that I don't know, because I don't."), but I would call her an atheist because she lived life without any belief in god. For a woman from her era, coming from her ultraconservative and ultraCatholic family, hers is a pretty impressive position by any name. The worst thing about religious funerals is how they manage to spend so much time talking about god and reciting ancient text passages instead of talking about the person that died. I don't want to be numbed into submission by boring chants and the empty consolation of "God's purpose." Agnes had an interesting life and I hope we take the opportunity to talk about her and not try to force the occasion into a belief system she rejected.

Now that I've morbidly featured her aunts, criticized religion, and linked to my wife's blog with the subtitle "blogging is just masturbating without the mess," I suppose this is as good a time as any to wish my mother a happy Mother's Day! Grandma too! So why not complete this with an awkward picture of both of them?