Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #10

Margie's brain

Margie said that the first time she opened a human skull, she half expected to see some evidence of the person's soul. What she found instead, she also said, was mushy tissue. "It was like opening a musk melon, maybe a pumpkin." Not long afterward, she once told me, was when she became convinced that there was no god—and certainly no God.

"How can you determine that from looking at a brain?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Science won me over," she said. "I thought about what I'd seen, what I felt in the texture of grooves on the brain. I'd always been ambivalent about religion, so ambivalent I couldn't even convince myself to become an agnostic. There was a time I was sure that God existed, and then a time when I simply hoped so. At some point I saw that bugs and fish and skunks and people all die the same way, for the most part—things just break down and stop working. Humans are nothing special, just as accidental as any other form of life. A bunch of chemicals get thrown into a pot, and something develops."

"What does that do to faith?" I asked.

"Not a thing," Margie said. "I'm not saying that faith is bad, or that belief in a god is bad. I just don't think either is necessary. I remember the first time I had to tell a patient's family that someone had died. A couple of them responded with something like, 'At least he's in a better place now.' I just didn't get that. I thought, If God gave us life and wanted us to live here, live as humans, why would we want to go to a better place? I began to see both God and heaven as human constructs and nothing more."

"Maybe belief gives us freedom," I said. "Or hope. I'd like to think that we do have a purpose, that we're not just a collection of accidents."

"I found some liberation when I stopped believing in god," she said. "And I found myself thinking that if I concentrated on doing as much good as I can while I'm alive, then that's enough—I don't have to hope for some 'better place.' I'm comfortable with being alive now, with being happy now."

I had admired my sister's abilities and intelligence for as long as I could remember, but no matter what she said, I wanted to believe that even those of us who had not accomplished or contributed much to society had some type of purpose, that there was hope of redemption. But, maybe that went to what Margie was saying....

Now, on the train, Margie was sitting with my father, and I thought I really should give her the Rhodia; perhaps she could gleen—or add—something I could not. Instead, I ran my hands across the smooth cover. And with my eyes closed, I reached my fingers into the middle of the notebook and felt how the pressure from someone's pen had created indents in the paper—small, grooves of thoughts and ideas left for me to feel.