What happens to an atheist when they die?

I’m a huge horror fan – scary movies, Stephen King, haunted houses, Halloween. The past few years there have been some awesome horror series, like The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor. Shows like Dark, Squid Game, and The Leftovers may not be horror, but they can safely be filed under “unsettling.” I watch them all. In the lead up to Halloween this year, friends and I were talking about our favourite horror series of the last decade: Midnight Mass. The premise: a young Catholic priest arrives at a remote island community to take over the town’s flagging parish. Also returning to his island hometown is Riley, who has just been released from prison for a drunk driving crash that killed a young woman. Riley and his childhood friend, Erin, are suspicious of the miracles the new priest seems to be working.

Like all good religious horror, the priest has a secret.

This series is great. I love it for its dark subject matter, its themes of mortality, its handling of religious fervor and how faith can be deadly. I especially love it because Riley is an atheist who grapples with death, and with guilt and self-loathing. You should watch it, immediately.

What I wanted to share here is my favourite moment in the series, where Erin asks Riley what he thinks happens when we die. There were several poignant moments in the show, but this one is forever my favourite. Riley responds:

I don’t know, and I don’t trust anyone who tells us they do, but I can speak for myself, I guess. 

When I die, my body stops functioning.  

Shut down.

All at once, or gradually. My breathing stops, my heart stops beating – clinical death. And a bit later, like, five whole minutes later, my brain cells start dying.

But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT. It’s the psychedelic drug released when we dream.  

So, I dream.

I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once. And my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination.  

And I am just… tripping. I mean, really tripping balls, because my mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories.

It’s a curtain call.  

The dream to end all dreams.  

One last great dream as my mind empties the f*cking missile siloes.  

And then… I stop.  

My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me. No pain. No memory, no awareness that I ever was… that I ever hurt someone… that I ever killed someone.  

Everything is as it was before me. And the electricity disperses from my brain until it’s just dead tissue. 

Meat.

Oblivion.

And all the other little things that make me up, the microbes and bacterium and a billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and my hair and my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living…

And eating.

And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life.

And I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled, and I’m billions of other places.

And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals and I am like the stars that are in the sky…

There one moment, and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.