Our fundamentally different dispositions likely come down to the simple yet massive gulf between us: the soul. You believe we have one and I don’t. I’m inclined to think sentience and all of its attendant wonders are the result of our neurological and bodily — and thus limited — perceptive capacities. That it is the world we are perceiving and interpreting that is sublime and immortal-seeming, so much so that we can’t help feel of it, so much so that we imagine we must have something sublime and immortal within ourselves. We do not. We die, we are forgotten. You, on the other hand, believe in an essential and immortal you that will continue to exist after death.

Growing up you had a flatulent black Labrador retriever named Brutus (Grandpa Lou always had a knack for naming dogs — Bones, Spunk, Cruella). One morning, as you were walking Brutus, a boy next door told you matter-of-factly that dogs didn’t have souls. You looked down into Brutus’s eyes and knew there and then that God was benevolent, that everything was sacred and filled with divine light, and that only the small and insecure minds of men could have dreamed up such a cruel and exclusionary vision of the world, a world which fetishized suffering and control and left little room for young women like yourself. The kind of women who asked questions and didn’t accept most of the answers. The kind of women who probably would have been burned as witches in the sixteenth century, tortured like Johann Kepler’s mother, like all the other difficult women. You looked up, punched the boy in the face, and walked on.