I think I would answer thusly:

We grieve as you do. With tears and heartache. With sorrow and longing. With anguish and misery. With suffering and loss. We go to sleep feeling hollow and wake up empty. With time and help from those around us who loves us, the grief may grow less immediate though no less cutting. We only lack one thing to make us like you; a god to foist responsibility of the loss on and to offer us some falacy of plans and better places (we never entertain the notion in the dark and lonely hours that our loved one did not make the cut and ended in eternal damnation, as you must, so there is that). We are left only with memories and an uncluttered vision of why our loved one died and no mental opiate to distance ourselves from that loss, which i think may be a greater way to pay homage to the passed, rather than to cuddle ourselves with hyms and angel wings to dull the pain.

...or i might just flick them really hard in the Adam's apple and leave before i did any real harm, depending on the day.

We hurt too. We accept the fact that this is the price of living, is to lose the ones your care about.

My husband died five months ago in a religious affiliated hospital. When they found out we we're atheists they left me completely alone in the room with his body and didn't offer any help at all. I had to seek out floor nurses to find out what to do. It was awful. Yes atheists sure do grieve but we also know to cherish every day we live and don't hang on to fairytale afterlife promises.

Grieve this!!!!!!

That was not the place for insults.

Grief is grief, but to comment on this without more information is not possible. How was this question asked and was there more to the question than what was presented here?

First I'd LOL!! and thank them for lightening my mood. Then I'd go on a rant about their rude idea that only "christians' can grieve or that we are somehow less likely to grieve because a prayer to god will make the grief stop. Finding solace with friends or just sitting by a river and quietly knowing it will pass.

In the last four years I've lost my father to natural causes, my son to suicide, my niece to cystic fibrosis and gotten divorced and never once did it occur to me to ask any gods for help. I have friends and family that I leaned on for support but if others need the help of religious institutions to help their grieving process, to each their own.

I think I would have a fake gummy baby with a liquid red center on hand.

I would then yell, "This is how! Hail Satan!" Then I would have taken a bite while the fake blood gushed out on everyone around me.

My sincere condolences for your loss. Grief is unique to each person with or without faith. The depth of caring and the investment in the relationship will determine the level and length of the grieving process. We all love differently and we all grieve differently, there is no right or wrong way to grieve.

You could have mentioned that animals grieve with no god to be had.

I am self made with everything that means. I had created my own defense mechanisms For Grief and for Life. I don't expect to work on somebody else. I am doing it now with my recently widowed kid sister. We need to transform her house away from the presence of the decease. I believe this plane... this earth.... this life.... is for the living.