Heavenly Allure
Posted by Holly at April 28th, 2007
Heaven is on my mind again. The thought of it has come and gone at various times in my life but I’ve never doubted its existence. I suppose, because of my age – my next birthday qualifies me for early Social Security distribution – and the fact that I’ve lost a spouse and a close companion who was as close to a spouse as he could get, and the fact that my new husband is in his seventies, heaven is a nearer possibility.
And, now, I think the fact that we live across the road from a sweet, small pioneer cemetery where my husband’s late wife rests is keeping the thought nearer to the front of my mind. The cemetery does, in fact, belong to the Catholic church where my husband professes his faith and where I sit with him most Sundays, and participate in some of the activities of the parish. The Church mindset seems to be that the only way into Heaven is through belief in the holy Apostolic church. I see this more as one of the deeply psychological marketing techniques – 2000 years old – that binds people to this system of belief than an absolute tenet. Really, how can we know? I can understand that the fledgling church needed to find ways to keep people attached to it – to begin with, they were hard won believers so finding something to keep them from fleeing to another system was a smart idea. Tying that idea to something so primitively touching as our afterlives and where they will be spent is brilliant. In my limited scholarship of religions, it seems to me that this is one thing most of them preach. An old family friend and a good born-again Christian, once said he believes in all religions just in case the other side is right. It’s a line I often use. What if the other side, the side other than my Jewish upbringing, is right and we should have all followed Jesus and his teachings lo those many years ago. In fact, I often tell people that I am from the Lord’s original religion. What I am worried about is that the Jewish people might have become so dissolute that Jesus was sent to correct our ways and we didn’t listen. At least those of us who continued to follow in the original path of Jesus and his family. And, really, I’m a little less concerned about that – since I’ve tried to construct a life that would get me into heaven regardless of what religion I practice. I am trying to be certain about what kind of place heaven is. Most of us don’t want to think we will just extinguish when we leave this life, except to live in the minds of those who follow; we want to know we are going somewhere and we want that place to be, well, perfect.
I see a heaven populated with actual people in their earthly forms and sometimes I think I get confirmation that it is so. My good friend Patrick died three years ago. We had a long relationship prevailing over 20 plus years in which we were loyal to each other although we weren’t married and didn’t live together. He always told me he knew I would make a bee-line for my late husband when I got to heaven. Pat loved hummingbirds. Where I lived, in Seattle, overlooking the Puget Sound and in the middle of the city, hummingbirds rarely made an appearance. In the nine years I lived in that location, I never saw one. A few days after Pat died however, as I sat just looking out toward the Puget Sound, not one but two hummingbirds flitted and hovered outside of the living room. I knew Pat, who died unexpectedly, had not only come to tell me of his future presence but he had brought Don with him. He knew I would recognize the hummingbird symbol. I went right out and bought a hummingbird feeder to hang off my deck at the very spot where the two birds hovered.
It’s not the only proof of life – or, at least, being – after death of which I know. I did go to a funeral recently, that of a woman in our community I had never met, at which I heard a remarkable story related by Father David who presides over our church community: Carolyn had Alzheimer’s and hadn’t been able to put together a full sentence for many months. She died on a Thursday. On the Monday before, in what Father David called the beginning of her final journey, she spoke two full sentences: “I am on the path” he reported she said, “and I see the light.”; and, then, “I see my mother waiting for me under a tree”. It may be that we are programmed to have that particular hallucination, about the light and about family members already gone, but I don’t think so. When my late husband was in the final stages of his dying, he said, one day, that he had a very strong sense of his mother, who had died a year before. I’ve always felt grateful to her for helping him over.
When I told those two stories to a woman I know, another woman whose husband died when they were young, she told me that the day her husband died was dark, gloomy and rainy. There was low light in the room and, for privacy, curtains had been drawn around her husband’s bed. At the moment of his death, my friend saw a beam of light from nowhere shine on her husband’s face.
Those events are enough for me to be able to look forward to something that eases the pain of loss on earth. I want to see Don and his mother and meet his father and brother. I really want to see my own Dad; have I got a lot to tell him. I want to know there is a sense of security and safety and embrace waiting. I want to find out why we can’t seem to really do anything about the dismal state of affairs down here on earth. I want to arrive in heaven fully intact and truly forgiven for what I intentionally and unintentionally did wrong.
But I also don’t want to go just yet. As alluring as heaven is, I hate it that I’m on this end of the timeline and it’s finally gotten good. Even though I still feel as if there is plenty of time ahead of me and a lot yet to be revealed, it doesn’t escape my notice that this probably isn’t true…..Yet I have the feeling that something keeps me here; something I can’t know or identify. My son, who was six years old throughout the dying of his father, and clearly trying to work it out in his head, told me one day that the reason Daddy hadn’t died yet was because his work on earth wasn’t finished. Those were the words I used when I had to tell Charlie, that awful November morning, that his father was dead. Daddy’s work on earth is finished, I said.
I hope I still have a lot of time left to work on earth. I like living. I hope I can find and do whatever it is that will give me that sense of fulfillment, but not too soon. Whenever my work is finished, I really believe, and a little bit hope, it’s just the way I think it is in heaven.
