About six months after my brother’s death, I moved from my hometown of Tucson, AZ to Dallas, TX and took over the leadership of Team Four Star, a group of Internet humorists I’d been involved in as a hobby since the group’s founding.

In Dallas, I began dating a woman who, she revealed to me after several months, was very religious. She told me she waited so long to tell me about her faith because she knew I didn’t share it. She decided to bring it up now because she was beginning to fear that she was suppressing an important part of herself in order to accommodate me.

I was taken aback. At the time I considered myself agnostic, but I was raised Catholic, and that aspect of my childhood was an important part of my life which I remember fondly to this day.

I told her I remembered what faith felt like and that I would never try to take that away from her intentionally. However, I could see that that’s exactly what had happened, simply by virtue of being important in her life. Between that reveal and several other factors too complex to get into here, I told her that I thought it was best that we break up.

I enjoyed teasing the audience with hints of romance between Eloy and Red, the party’s sorceress. Image courtesy of Millin21.

Now she was taken aback. She challenged my lack of faith. She called into question everything I had shared with her about my life, including the experiences that lead to my decision to move to Dallas and lead Team Four Star. Couldn’t I see all of that as evidence of God’s hand guiding me, preparing me? A divine architect who had designed the course of my life for me?

When she said “experiences”, she was thinking about things like learning from my mentor how to lead a team. Things like discovering how to break down the walls between my Internet self and my real-life self.

Then her faced changed. She realized that there was one big thing, The Big Thing, that had happened right before I made the decision to move. I could see in her face the moment it occurred to her.

My brother’s death.

“You know,” she said, “…except for the bad stuff.”

Except for the bad stuff.

That offended me. And I am not easily offended. I got up and left the room. I didn't want to be angry at this woman who I knew cared about me and only wanted to share the faith that was such a comfort for her.

It wasn’t a comfort for me. My brother didn’t die at the age of 27 because God wanted to teach me some lesson or prepare me to lead a bunch of Internet funnymen. That idea held no solace for me. It reduced my brother, who had been a person, a whole person, into some kind of prop.

It was offensive. Blasphemous.

We are still friends, but we are no longer together.

Better to believe that my brother’s death had no purpose, that it was random and cruel and fundamentally absurd, and that if there was meaning to be found in it, that it was up to me to find it, to create it if it wasn’t there to be found. To make it mean something by sheer force of will. That idea was a cold comfort, but it was the only comfort I could access.

I remember that day as the day I became an atheist.