What a lovely story about your grandmother's passing. That certainly is the ideal way of leaving. I have been grappling a lot with my views lately. I have been lucky to not have lost anyone very close to me up until recently. Although I may be a bit morbid naturally in my thinking - and therefore casually think about death close to every day - having someone I knew actually face it takes the thinking to the next level. I fall into the "one with the universe" theory ultimately, tweaked a bit here and there - I am a millennial after all. (I actually had to google to confirm this, lol.) I base this theory off of nothing intelligent. It is a feeling I get when I am outside in my garden, up against the woods, away from human noise and interaction, at dusk. I feel it then - a balance I equate to being a wild animal. A small piece of being something more that is just outside of my comprehension. My husband calls that happy brain chemistry. It doesn't really matter what we think, I suppose, so long as we are coping and harmonious.
Interesting about your friends in LA - I like to hear about the general opinions on life of different regions.
Thanks for a bit of deep thinking.
I've also been very lucky in that way, and I haven't had to do much facing the inevitability of death, which is rarely this pleasant. My partner is a "one with the universe" believer as well. I feel echoes of it at times, particularly when I'm out in nature in situations similar to the one you're describing. Nature is so awesome (literally awesome) and all-enveloping. I live in the ultimate liberal bubble of people who (mostly) have very little contact with actual organized religion and tend to be condescending toward mainstream Christianity, and the kinds of moral codes that typically come from evangelicals. I too have felt alienated from mainstream Christianity at times in my life, and I can't stand when people try to inject their religion into politics in ways that impose it on others. On the other hand, it's ironic because I see so much codified morality and spirituality coming from the same people who think that they're somehow different because their spirituality isn't Biblical. We all have more in common than we think. But yes, I 100% agree with your point--it doesn't really matter what we think, as long as we're all coping and harmonious.
I live in the stark opposite of your environment. Here almost everyone is an active church goer. One expects to hear "have a blessed day" when leaving a store. (That phrase really annoys me. The implication always strikes me as though I have some sort of control over whether I am blessed because I must be a believer, but don't bad things also happen to believers? Does that make them not blessed, even though they believed, in which case having a blessed day comes back to the equivalent of "have a lucky day", in which case why do they need to throw in an element of religion when they could just say "have a good day"? I don't know. Maybe I should just chill out and be glad they want my day to be blessed.) I don't really share a lot of the standard devout person's beliefs, but there is a sensation of safety in it. I am more likely to trust the person parked next to me at the grocery store because they believe in someone instructing morality. Maybe that is naive of me.