Like most people, I’ve often wondered what heaven is like – or rather, I wonder what other people think heaven is like. As a child, I suppose I believed that you’d be reunited with people who’d died, but of course, since all the people I knew who’d died seemed to be about the same age (old) I didn’t worry about what stage of life they’d be at. So what is heaven like? Are you reunited with all the people that you’ve loved or just the virtuous ones? What about pets? What about places that you loved and that have been replaced by housing developments and shopping malls?
My mother died this week, and I’m reminded of one of my favorite “old timey” songs that I first heard sung by Mike Seeger.
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world of woe
But there’s no sorrow, toil, or danger
In that bright world to which I go.
I’m going there to see my mother
I’m going there no more to roam
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home.
My mother, in the last few years, was not the mother I remembered growing up with. She had developed Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia and no longer had interest in people. She recognized us, her children, but no longer had the same personality. I don’t know if she remembered who she used to be or was aware of what she had lost. Perhaps she did but no longer cared.
Last night I lay awake remembering scenes from our life growing up. Holding baby Katy, my younger sister. Cooking leg of lamb for Sunday dinner. Smoking a cigarette in the front seat of the car on our summer vacation in France. She was intensely interested in people and had a knack for spotting celebrities in the street. She had a remarkable memory for all sorts of trivia and I often wonder what she would have made of her life if she had had the opportunities that we have had. Even as an older person, I remember walking with her to the town center in Saffron Walden and stopping every few feet to talk with a neighbor or to point out where someone lived. All of this disappeared in her later years. Talking to her just seemed to annoy her. I remember calling her one day and a football match was on the telly, and though she didn’t even like football she kept it on while she gave automatic responses to my attempts to engage her in conversation.
A few years ago, when I was laid up in hospital, under the influence of some heavy duty narcotics, I had an experience which I suppose corresponds to the Zen concept of the “eternal now.” I was listening to a Haydn symphony and I heard and understood every note separately, complete in itself, weighing for eternity. I understood that the moment that I observed did not disappear into the unreachable past, but that it existed, and that though my point of view might shift, the note stood for eternity. I think Pete Townshend must have had a similar experience.
There once was a note, pure and easy,
Playing so free, like a breath rippling by.
The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me,
Forever we blend it, forever we die.
That’s how I remember my mother. Not how she died, but how she lived her life. And that, of course, is the meaning of life