Each word of hope or faith I read seemed absurd, like a fairy tale. The mothers of kidnapped children know in their bones when their child is somewhere, out there, alive. My bones knew that mine was not.

I was moved by these words from strangers. And I wanted to believe these messengers who told me my son lives or will live again. Perhaps these were the people we in my old religion called prophets and apostles — people who dispatched words of hope to those in distress.

But though they were sincere, none of what they said was true. There is no heaven, no door at the end of my life that I will find my boy behind, no paradise Earth. He simply had ceased to exist.

I suspect that these people rushed to save me because, deep down, somewhere unacknowledged, they too knew the truth. We all know that there is something desperately sad that we have to protect one another from. Our stomachs know it, our spines know it. Our humanity doesn’t want to let us believe that this is all there is, that a child can just disappear. And that is why these strangers cared so much about a stranger like me.

What I had not anticipated about the cost of losing my faith was that it would no longer be possible to deceive myself. I could no longer make a pact with any higher being. No hours of service could convince a God that I deserved to have this child again. Whatever I had done to deserve him once, I was not worthy of him twice.

I am not saying there is no God, but I am saying no God would do this to someone.

My family and friends from my old life knew about what happened to my son. Though they never met him, they read newspapers. A couple of them reached out to me after he died. But they had already shunned me as an apostate for my unbelief, and I know about their belief, so the conversations were awkward and over quickly. I was keenly aware that they walked away certain that they would be the ones to hold my son after Judgment Day, because I would not be there. They would look after him and tell him about his tragic lost mother, who gave him up because she could no longer believe. I know this is what they think, because I would have thought the same.

If I could believe even a little again, perhaps it would happen to me, like it does to other people. Their dead come alive, appearing at bedsides on dark nights, or as voices in the wind. These voices tell the grieving ones that they forgive them, that they love them, that they are somewhere else, they exist, and all is not nothingness.