Tag: grief

  • A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 7

    A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 7

    I once went to a church with a friend, where eventually everyone was jumping up and down to the music. They were smiling and shouting like they were in heaven on earth.

    Thing is though, that we couldn’t stay there. My friend, as I recall, had a pretty tough time of it in ordinary life on regular days of the week.

    It really didn’t help me with my picture of Heaven. Her crayon drawing still looked like Rorschach’s black ink to me.

    Another friend had once taken me to Sunday school at their more formal church. (Why anyone would want to get up earlier go to Sunday school, when we already HAD to go to school five days a week, I never did figure out.)

    Anyway, they had something they studied called a ‘catechism’ (or something like that). I thought about the first question and answer I had seen on their list:

    “What is the chief end of man?”

    The answer given is, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.”

    I guessed that since Heaven is where God is supposed to be, that it must be where we sing with choirs of angels and glorify God forever… IF we ever get there.

    I was never too excited about the prospect. ‘Isn’t there anything better to do,’ I thought?

    In any case, I had to come up with an answer for her, so finally I said,

    “Those stars by your Mommy look like a choir. I’ll bet they’re angels, singing to God.”

    There. I had said it. And we both stared at her picture of Heaven.

    Then I managed a smile as I added this childish afterthought:

    “Does your mommy have wings?

    “NO. Of course not. She’s my mommy.”

    “My mommy doesn’t have wings. She’s NOT an angel; she’s just in Heaven with them. See this?”

    ‘What?’ I thought, as I looked toward the small dot on her picture to which she pointed.

    “That’s an angel with wings,” the little girl explained. An angel is different.”

    (I didn’t see it.)

    Then she further pointed out of these small dots (that all looked like stars to me):

    “These are angels. SEE? They’re all one color. But THESE are souls of humans who have died. I made them all different colors, but not the same as angels.”

    “Wow,” I acknowledged. “I didn’t know that.”

    “I’ll bet your Mommy is shining brighter because she is so proud of you.”

    “No.” And she looked to her daddy, whose lap she crawled up on.

    “Daddy is proud of me too; but right now, he doesn’t feel so much like shining.”

    (Children can be brutally honest sometimes, and I was a little embarrassed to have been the cause of her honesty.)

    “Besides,” she continued, “Mommy always shined brightly when she talked about Jesus.”

    (Where did Jesus come into the picture, I wondered.)

  • A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 6

    A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 6

    I swallowed hard and looked away as a tear came to my eye.

    Of course, I thought, maybe that’s her mommy in the casket. I had not had time for thought of all of the family connections of my lost loved one.

    Friends…dear and rare friends… become just like family. We don’t really know them. They have husbands, wives, kids, moms, grandpas, and all the rest.

    “We never really knew him,” I had just heard someone say either of the living relative or another family member who had died.

    That’s right. We don’t really know them, do we?

    So when the little girl said of a bright star on a picture of Heaven: “That one’s my Mommy,” I had not expected it.

    “She’s not REALLY brighter than the other stars…” the little girl said, as I gathered my emotions and attention back into the room. “My mommy’s star is just brighter for me so that I can always see that she is still there.”

    I thought about it. And I thought of this little motherless child, who now would no longer have the nurturing embrace of her mother for all of those moments in life when you really need a hug.

    (I think another tear started from one eye.)

    Then she asked me another question about which I had no idea.

    Do you know anybody in Heaven?

    Wow. I looked nervously about…

    “I don’t know.”

    I quickly tried to steer our conversation back into the stuff of crayons on paper. “Can we see in your picture?”

    “I don’t know,” she replied, “We’ll have to look.”

    We both examined her drawing a little more.

    “What do YOU see?” she asked as she nuzzled up to me.

    (A professional psychologist could not have asked a better question with a Rorschach ink picture.)

    I stared into her picture of Heaven…

  • A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 5

    A Picture of Heaven – Chapter 5

    [In case you are joining our serial short story about grief a little late, here is a link to the beginning.]

    “Do you see all those stars,” the little girl asked? “There are more of them in heaven than sand on the beach. Know how I know?”

    I nodded that I didn’t and her dad looked our way in interest (for he too had been silent all along).

    The little girl continued: “God told Abraham,

    You’ll have more kids than the sand on the beach or the stars in the sky.” [Gen.22:17]

    “Well, that was a long time ago and there’s lots more stars in heaven now.”

    I smiled and nodded confirmation of the little girl’s encouragement.

    I was thinking about the lifeless fluid-filled corpse in the casket. It wasn’t very encouraging. The scene was as frightening to me, truth-be-told, as the wax-carved bodies at Ripley’s.

    Another image quickly came to mind. If zombies could be real as dancers in a music video, then the next room would be as fearsome as death.

    I glanced ever-so-briefly toward the adjacent doors, through which I had fled into this vestibule.

    As I looked back to the girl and her picture I asked, “Why is that star so much brighter?”

    (I had not considered the impact of her matter-of-fact answer.)

    “THAT one’s my Mommy.”

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