I wrote Grieving Futures back in 2010, and threw it up online pretty quickly. It served as a cathartic bleed out of my emotions regarding my experiences with grief, and as tool in helping to reach out to other grievers. It lives up to its dual purposes, I think.

But it’s not all I have to say. On deck for a while now is a book I call The Empty Bowl: An Atheist Confronts Grief. It’s another biographical essay, I suppose, in that it recounts my erstwhile “search for God” during and after my parents’ deaths. It is not just about my own spiritual journey, though; tentatively, it also addresses godless grief in a more straightforward way than Grieving Futures does.

But therein lies the rub. I don’t want it to be a book about negatives, which I mean in the clinical sense not the judgmental one. Often discussion of atheism is focused on what it isn’t, i.e. a religion, and therefore is littered with commentary that boils down to the phrase “atheists don’t believe in God, a god, or gods.”

I think that leaves a lot of room for discussion what atheists go through otherwise, emotionally. Of course that’s not universal, and particularly with non-deists, the spectrum is infinite in regards to reactions to death. We tend to make things up as we go along.

Which is what the Empty Bowl will be about, I think. Less “this is what I did” than “this is why I did it” with a fair amount of “I wonder how I could have done that differently.” What is the value in such a story? That’s something I’ve gnawed on for a while, because personal essays can become self-indulgent so easily. I tried to avoid that trap with Grieving Futures and I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

One factor that will be predominate will be my desire for community and connection with others who might understand what I was going through, and help me. I think my search for God was less a truly spiritual crusade than a desire to find a community I could belong to without bowing to personal hypocrisy.