I'm going to a funeral today. It'll be a non-religious one: just the children of the man who died suddenly (his wife thinks his heart bypass failed after 15 years) will speak, and there'll be a piper playing a lament.

Rustic Rebel, I hate the ad breaks too - though at this stage I kind of grin and nudge myself when they start: "Xx was not a religious person, but at the end..." They're so blatant! The one good thing about this funeral will be that there is none of that.

As for atheism, religion, all our ideas about whether some part of us survives after death - we don't know. My gut feeling is that something does. Other people's gut feeling is that nothing survives. There's absolutely no point in worrying about it, since there's nothing we can do about it.

Raptor's right about the puppy, though. A puppy will demand your love - the love that's dammed up because the friends it belonged to are gone. If that dammed-up love doesn't get out it just rots there and corrodes you inside. If it's given - in tears and laughter, with walks and runs and wrestling - it'll pour out into the world where it belongs.

And if you're getting a dog, also get Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot the Dog (Amazon.com has it).