David Rieff, Susan Sontag's son, has written a book about his mother's death, Swimming in a Sea of Death.
Here's an excerpt from a really sober and fascinating interview with Rieff from Salon.
Your mother was an atheist. She refused to accept any consolation from the hope of an afterlife. How much did that contribute to her dread?
Well, I'm an atheist too; if anything, more militant than my mother. I think it would have been grotesque of my mother to have become a person of faith purely in the interest of consoling herself. Surely, that would have been the most terrible therapeutic use of faith, and a disgrace in terms of faith. You shouldn't start to believe because it suits you.
But it does raise the question: Without the consolation of religion, does the prospect of dying lead to dread?
Well, it sure doesn't help. I don't know. There are certainly religious traditions that don't believe in an afterlife. So I don't think we can just take the Christian or the Islamic model and say those visions of a personal afterlife are what religious faith is. If you look at Buddhism, if you look at Judaism, neither has an afterlife in that sense. So I'm not sure it's faith vs. atheism.