Fundamentalists Don't Care that We're All Going to Die

The Children's Cemetery, Joni Ernst, Carpe Diem, and Choosing to Live

Today is June 2, 2025. Two years ago, I was on the Queen Mary 2, and the ship had pulled into Southampton, England overnight. Shiny Happy People, the Amazon docuseries I was a part of, released in the wee hours before dawn. I watched two episodes from my stateroom and had to take a break. My story is primarily in episodes 2 and 4, and the feeling of international exposure on my most vulnerable experiences was intense.

I was on the QM2 for the second time that year, on a quest for slow travel to process grief and loss (my second marriage + various friends and family who were not interested in my pivotal life changes) and to recenter during those very pivotal life changes. 2023 was a year of massive personal evolution and closure, and I needed time to slow down and breathe. I found it on the ocean.

I’ve shared so much of that story before, and if you’ve followed my work over these past two years, you’ve heard pieces of that epic solo adventure. Facebook Memories popped up with this meme I shared, and last week I reposted it with a caption:

What I left off the caption: No one needs to spend their lives miserable, “committed” to a relationship (of any kind) where acceptance isn’t core. What a waste of time for all involved. What a gift it is when someone clarifies they want off your ride. Please do not waste my time pretending. I adore the rich relationships I have with those who say, “I’m glad I get to know this version of you, too.” But it’s a special kind of gratitude I feel for the ones who said, “Nah, thanks, I liked you better the way you were before.”

Godspeed. Go and find your bliss. I have better things to know, places to see, and people to love. Faretheewell. “Clarity is kind.” —Brené Brown.

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I carry a desperate anxiety not to waste time. I don’t mean in the productive sense; I mean in the Mary Oliver “one wild and precious life” sense. In the Professor John Keating sense: “Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

Carpe Diem came to me as a nervous teenager, terrified the rapture would come before I could find love and have children. Making the most of the life we have, to suck the marrow out of the years we’re granted, felt like oxygen when I could barely breathe. I could feel time running out, already dying, already charged with the mandate to “long for eternity with Christ” because “this world is not your home,” when I actually wanted as much time on earth as possible. Eternity can wait. It’s forever. Here, is only a little while.

As an evangelical teenager, I knew there were responsibilities to meet before I could carpe my own day. I needed to serve with JOY (Jesus, Others, You), become a godly, submissive wife, mother as many children as possible, see them through to adulthood, and then, (hopefully) there’d be a little gap before grandparenting and more service to my church as an older woman kicked in. I also needed to dodge the threats: accidents, cancers, sudden strokes and aneurysms, viral pandemics, Y2k, and mystery diseases unleashed by a hostile government. To do this, I’d grind my own grains, avoid additives, get back to the land, sew my own clothes, eliminate TV and modern culture, have my babies at home, and skip the doctor—the list went on and on. All of it was work that had to be done before “play.” The work list never ended.

As I grew up in my twenties, having babies, baking bread, mowing the lawn in a dress I had sewn myself, and smiling at a man who didn’t like me, I noticed the women around me, my “Titus 2” role models. They didn’t evolve; they endured. They tried to make it through the day with their chin up, finding creative solutions to problems that the world had solved generations ago. Their uteruses prolapsed; their breasts metastasized. Marriages were “hard,” but we didn’t expect better. Our glory was in remaining dedicated to service, even if it was for people you didn’t enjoy, laboring in ways you weren't good at. The point is, you never quit.

Fundamentalism consumes our lifetimes because we are literally human fuel. In the JOY model, it’s never your turn; there is always someone else you can serve instead. A scarcity mindset roots itself into everything: there’s not enough time because there’s not enough of everything, including enough of you to go around.

Years later, I would learn that a plot device in writing is to apply a deadline, so the characters are compelled to race and work hard. Time scarcity creates psychological tension, so our hearts race and we keep flipping through the pages. The characters double down on whatever needs to be done to keep going, because we’re running out of time.

My epiphany felt like a long, giant soap bubble, edged with prisms in the sun, bursting. Now I understood why the pastors wanted us to skip this life and press toward the goal to win the prize of heaven. Why the policies we pushed were antiquated and anti-life, and why we didn’t invest or involve ourselves in bettering the world around us. Why they wanted women pregnant, but didn’t seem too interested in the needs of babies and young children, except how those children reflected on them.

Shortened life spans and exhaustion were okay. They were OK if we died young, if we died in childbirth, if our children died, and if the citizens around us died. Human calamity “culled the herd,” as I heard in sermons. Death separated the “wheat from the tares” because the godly went to heaven, and the ungodly stopped requiring resources. Disease could be good; it could cleanse the population (bookmark that for when you realize which populations are harmed most by rampant disease). The human harvest was saved.

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Over the weekend, my partner and I were visiting area nurseries for our garden. One of them had a historic church as part of the property, a converted chapel for an event space, and a gated cemetery. Within minutes, I realized all of the graves were children.