Now that I read this, I understand better what you mean by two novels: the novel about how people's sense of the world they lived in is not the same as the world seen in retrospect is so different from the novel about the metaphysics of afterlife....

...though now that I think about it, I can see the connection: you thought the world was one way when you were alive, and it turns out, from the vantage point of death, to have been different; you imagined certain deities to be fictional and thought you knew what afterlife would be like, and you turn out to have been wrong about that too.

(There's a line in one of Laurie Anderson's songs where she says "Oh boy. Wrong again." Jumps to mind here.)

As for the writer not quite being up to the challenge, wow, yes, I think that can happen. I ask myself sometimes, what do I (and you can replace "I" with "anyone" and adjust verbs accordingly, because I wonder what other people decide on this point, too...) do if the story I want to tell is one I'm not up to telling. How does one gain the power to write the story? Do you write other things, write around it, until you figure out how? But what if you never get there? Or do you struggle to write it, and maybe do a poor job? And if you do that, can you try again?

People answer those questions in lots of different ways, I realize.