Richard Rorty - who died in 2007 - tells of how, after he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, it was poetry that was of most use to him in thinking about his situation. Not religion, not philosophy, and not prose, but poetry. And this not because of truths which poetry could relay but cannot be stated in prose. There aren't any, Rorty says. No, only because he 'would have lived more fully' had he known more verse.
This is of course a personal, not universalizable, judgement, and Rorty wouldn't have argued to the contrary given his own philosophical leanings. But when I think about what is of help to someone who cannot entertain the hopes that are offered by religion, my own feeling is of something more general than Rorty's choice - of poetry. It is continuity both with the past and with the future: with the past in the sense of having had the chance to be part of the abundance that is the world, to have experienced some fraction of its wonders, and to have had people who cared about you and whom you cared about, loved, befriended; and with the future by virtue of whatever small thing you may have contributed to it and by the hope of being remembered, if only for a while, by those you were close to.
To some this may not seem much, yet to me it looks like something bigger than poetry, though I don't in any way disparage the value of that.