Heather McManamy recently passed away from metastatic cancer. Before she died, she wrote a final letter to the world, posted on Facebook by her husband Jeff. Her words have since gone viral—the letter is as hopeful and hilarious as it is heart-wrenching. It starts with the disarmingly to-the-point line, “So … I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, apparently, I’m dead.”

What’s refreshing about the letter is how Heather affirmed her life rather than fell victim to it. She didn’t want people to say she lost a battle to cancer, and she urged her friends to run up a bar tab at her funeral that would make her proud. “Heck, blast ‘Keg on My Coffin’ and dance on the bar for me,” she wrote.

But for some readers, the most striking piece of her goodbye note is where she asserted how her death should be discussed with her young daughter Brianna.

“Whatever religion brings you comfort, I am happy that you have that. However, respect that we are not religious. Please, please, please do not tell Brianna that I am in heaven. “In her mind, that means that I chose to be somewhere else and left her. In reality, I did everything I could to be here with her, as there is nowhere, NOWHERE, I would rather be than with her and Jeff. Please don’t confuse her and let her think for one second that is not true. “Because, I am not in heaven. I’m here. But no longer in the crappy body that turned against me. My energy, my love, my laughter, those incredible memories, it’s all here with you.”

Reddit user swordstool shared Heather’s letter in Reddit’s Atheism community, and it sparked a complex discussion about explaining death to children when you don’t believe in an afterlife. Pew research shows that younger generations are just as spiritual as their elders, but less religious—two-thirds of millennials say they believe in heaven, compared with roughly three-quarters of baby boomers and members of the silent generation (adults born from 1928 through 1945).

Some redditors believe that using religion to explain why bad things happen in the world can further confuse children.

Others shared the words that provided them with comfort when they lost a loved one.

A similar discussion took place in the Ask Reddit community after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Atheist parents shared how they approached the hard topic of death with their children.

One of the most practical responses came from Reddit user SharkReceptacles, a children’s bookseller who has seen the many different ways death is approached in storybooks. The redditor wrote that there’s one book called Waterbugs and Dragonflies that touches upon an afterlife, and almost no one buys it. “Stuff about ghosts and/or heaven turns most parents away,” SharkReceptacles says, “because they’d prefer their kid to grasp the reality of the situation fully before they introduce puzzling elements.”

The books that SharkReceptacles recommends are Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, which “deals with grief, loss and general sadness with blistering honesty” and Sue Varley’s Badger’s Parting Gifts, which “encourages those left behind to concentrate on all the lessons the older, wiser deceased taught them in life.”

From Michael Rosen’s Sad Book:

SharkReceptacles added, “My parents are atheists and my best friend died when we were 10 years old. I certainly appreciated being told in a matter-of-fact tone with a tight cuddle and a cup of sweet tea and an invitation to ask questions. Anything else would’ve been too much to process at that horrendous, overwhelming moment.”

Others have written about how to comfort children, sans religion, in discussions about death. In her post titled “How to Talk to Kids About Death,” blogger Joanna Goddard wrote that she chose to describe her brother-in-law’s death to her son Toby in a practical way: “‘Uncle Scott died, which means he can’t talk, eat, walk or run anymore.’ It felt a little strange to me to describe death that way, but Toby seemed to appreciate the literal description.”

Writer Tracy Moore believes that how parents explain death to kids can impact how they view their lives. “When you tell your kid that you’re on earth for as long as you’re on earth, and no one really knows what happens after, it can be liberating,” she writes. “It can be simple to explain that the most important thing you can do with the time you’ve got is make it count, and try to leave things better than you found them.”

In her final letter, Heather McManamy wrote, “Please tell Brianna stories, so she knows how much I love her and how proud of her I will always be (and make me sound waaay cooler than I am). Because I love nothing more than being her mommy. Nothing. Every moment with her was a happiness I couldn’t even imagine until she came crashing into our world.”

No matter what words come after, Brianna can know she was, and is, so loved.