Throughout my childhood and even until today, I struggled with the idea of what Heaven looked like. I went to Sunday school regularly, so I saw all the pictures of the brilliant light in streaming pastel-colored rays piercing the huge cumulus clouds and penetrating the ether to end beneficently on the Earth below. I heard all about the milk and honey (I was never fond of either), of harps and haloes, and even subscribed for a short time to the bells and wings hypothesis. About two weeks after my husband Jeff died, I had a very clear dream that revealed Heaven as a beautiful gated country club sort of place. In the dream, he and I were floating together over a road that ran for miles and miles through a green rolling meadow. When we reached the country club, he told me that he was going in, but that I could not. I pleaded to be taken along, but he said no, and once inside the gates, proceeded to return to the form of the handsome, healthy man with whom I had fallen in love before the cancer ravaged his brain and the cures ravaged his body.
I think that, as an avid golfer and outdoorsman, the image was Jeff’s heaven, but not mine. Today, I got a much clearer vision of what Heaven looks like. This afternoon my dear, patient, thoughtful, loving, and wise Uncle Stan passed over, and I suddenly realized a very clear picture of Heaven. Heaven begins with the two deep tones of a door chime, and the sound of the door opening, and the words, “Welcome home, mija!”
Heaven, I know, is my grandmother’s hug and a cup of fresh coffee. It is my grandfather’s smile and the chuckle that begins in his ample midsection and burbles up like a well until it tumbles into the air like a gentle spring. Heaven is my uncle Lenny’s laughter, and the sound of his one heavy shoe as he strides to greet me. Heaven is Jeff’s long arms folding me to him, the feel of his foot at the end of the bed, and his smile at the beginning and the end of the day. Jeff is in my heaven, too.
Heaven is different for each of us. Uncle Stan may have entered a different Heaven, possibly located on Maui or in the Sierra foothills along a trout stream, just as Jeff entered his country club Heaven, but the really wonderful part is that we each get our very own Heaven.
I find this thought comforting in this time of simultaneous relief and sadness. Uncle Stan had been ill for a very long time, and now he is his youthful self once again. He is the man so deeply in love with his beautiful wife (“Your aunt ‘Nita could really fill out a sweater!”), so proud of his children, and whose open arms and warm laughter greeted me throughout my early childhood: “There’s my big girl!” Uncle Stan pushed the small black button that elicits that chime just after five o’clock today, and Nana just reached up to embrace him.
There will be many more people who ring the bell before I do, and now, as I face my own mortality once again, I am consoled by the knowledge that there will be so many wonderful people in my Heaven when I open the door.
Good-bye, Uncle Stan. I love you.
“Welcome home, mijo!”
