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An Agnostic At His Mother's Deathbed

From Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, by Christopher Buckley

I stammered out my thanks to Joe for everything he’d done for her. He asked, “Do you want to leave the respirator in or let nature take its course?” I said, “Let’s remove the respirator.”

I’d brought with me a pocket copy of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The line in Moby-Dick had lodged long ago in my mind: “The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” I’d grabbed it off my bookshelf on the way to Virginia, figuring that a little fine-hammered steel would probably be a good thing to have on this trip. I’m agnostic now, but I haven’t quite reached the point of reading aloud from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion at the deathbed of a loved one.