“What happens when we die?” My four year old pipes up from her booster seat as we wait to turn left onto Linton Hall at the Rt. 28 stoplight.
“Do we become babies again?” She asks in the empty space that hangs between us. I try to recover from my surprise, scramble for the right words to tell her that nobody knows.
“No,” I say, and think to myself, "Well, maybe if reincarnation is the real deal." Even though I consider just about anything a possibility, our family is Catholic, so I say, “Our Church teaches us that we go to Heaven to live with God when we die.”
She says, “Oh,” and thus ends the discussion … for now, at least. But as our favorite great-aunt is shuttled between the nursing home and the hospital at age 95, this won’t be the last of my young daughter’s questions.
I was careful about my word choice because I don’t want to tell her that I simply don’t know. That my faith, although it’s carried me this far, hasn’t really sustained the childhood picture of heaven as a bunch of winged creatures treading barefoot on big fluffy white clouds, strumming harps.
I don’t know how to tell her that when my grandfather died – the man who’d raised me, who’d long battled kidney failure and subsequent infections from dialysis – I began to think of heaven as right here on Earth, as the spirit becoming a part of the physical world and experiencing an eternal feeling of peace as well, part of a beautiful waterfall or mountaintop, if you will. I guess that concept is more in keeping with animism than Christianity, but it made more sense to me ten years ago than the dead taking long naps or their souls floating around in purgatory, waiting for someone to bang the final gong so they could be reunited with their corporal bodies, glorified, of course.
We visited Aunt M. a couple of weeks ago when she was admitted to the hospital the first time. She sat in her wheelchair, still a force to be reckoned with, and we talked about trips we’d taken, vacations we’d spent together … like seeing Bubble Mountain behind Jordan Pond in Acadia National Park last summer, and eating lobster at Jordon Pond House. The kids gave her pictures they’d made and get-well cards we’d bought of Snoopy dancing in front of his dog house. We took more photographs to go with the hundreds we have from years spent together as a family; she has really been a grandmother to them, not an aunt.
She is herself a Sister of Charity, and therefore had no immediate family after her brother, my grandfather, passed away. Being with us on Christmas morning, watching the kids open their gifts, snuggling with the children on the couch, and reading them stories … she received the pleasures of family life in her golden years, as she had not experienced since she was herself a girl.
She may recover completely from the blood clot surgery, and we may still get to make more memories, but we know the day is coming when we will say goodbye to whatever certainty we have in this life. Although I’m not exactly sure how to reconcile my own complex thoughts about the afterlife with the iconic illustrations of white robes and blue skies not unlike our own, my gut tells me that some part of us goes on living and loving when we die. And for now, this is comfort enough.
Like many moms, Kathy drives a mini-van full of booster seats and Disney/Pixar DVD’s. When she’s not chauffeuring her kids, ages 10 and under, to school and activities, she teaches for Prince William County Public Schools, writes fiction, poetry and this column about the challenges and rewards of being a mom to young children.
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