Hope

I hope in heaven. Most of me wants to say I believe- unconditionally and faithfully- but the realist in me just clings to that sliver of hope we open every Easter and Christmas. A heaven I can touch- maybe not the glittering pearly cityscapes built on cloudy platforms, the dreams of our childhood- but something more than the whatever nothingness is. Because to think that this is all we have is beyond sad. And it fills me with everything void of hope to believe that this world, where hatred is so casual and so cruel is the gift I leave to my children, who will look up to me one day and ask where heaven is and will they ever get there someday? And even if I don’t believe  I will paint them pictures, little sugar covered lies to inflame some sense of hope in them until they are old enough to fear for themselves. So now I wonder if it’s comforting to know that the entire human race, so many cultures, so many people on this one little planet are all stranded together in the murky tossed tides of hope. It’s comforting in a sad way.

Everyone deals with this trial differently- at a young age we are asked to step from the shadows cast by our parents and question these things on our own. How permanent is death? Where is heaven and how far away is it?  Will I ever get there? But so many of our childhood questions get shelved with the other unanswerable voices. Our curiosity fades with time, our adult selves marrying science and philosophy and leaving the religious fairy tales for later dates, when we are old maybe. When we are close to death. No one talks about death openly, or heaven or religion or what to believe in - more for fear of offending someone  than  the idea that you might comfort them.

And it isn’t until we are faced with the truly cold sting of death, when someone we love or knew or was so close to us dies, do we question it. Something sparks inside us, we are left with those unanswered questions from our childhood and so the child and the adult in us battle for some kind of common ground to come up with answers that make sense. Suddenly, no matter our age, we are children. Children forced to grow up in a truly unfair amount of time. We are terrified and scared, screaming inside, tearing at the walls built up around us, engulfed in an unnamed fear for someone we loved, unmoving for no real reason except that they do not breathe. While the adult of us is forced to smile and try to make sense of it, arrange plans, hold hands for the others around us, all looking lost. That one fragile thread of loss and pain and the fear of hope connecting us like spider webs. The silhouette of a human form like glass on the table. The "Thank you for coming, I know the snowstorm is bad." Suddenly, like the breath we all inhale as one, is cold. You’re fighting to stay afloat while the internal battle you’ve been waging is dying to explode... It's electricity illuminates the air, sparks off your skin, burns every fiber of your being.The back of your black high heel is cutting into you, the flowers are all made of a sickly sweet poison, suffocating everyone, fluorescent lights cut sharply through red rimmed eyes. But you can’t feel anything for some reason. It's like you are evaporating. Every sensation is numbed down by grief and hopelessness and fear. So you just smile. Is this the death we were afraid of as children? Because standing in the memory I wonder who had it worse. The person on the table or the crowd crying over the lifeless form?

Eventually the flowers die too. And the cars pull away and the questions fade back into your subconsciousness as life swirls and goes on. And your sighs are heavier than they once were but they’re still the testament that you breathe. Cold sharp air that hurts, but feels good. It’s everything backwards and upside down and we lock all those awful images and feelings away for a time in our future when we can fully understand them. When we are older…

So it isn’t until you’re sitting on the cold hardwood floors of the old bedrooms do you feel that sharpness. In the face of a tiny black hairbrush lined with blond hair. In the glimpse into a vanity mirror reflecting a person who were so sure you knew... now just a sad shadow. Some unnamed emotion overruns you like a tidal wave. Something so painful and poignantly sad it steals the air from your lungs, until your lying on the floor, without enough life even left to cry, just hoping this horrible feeling washes away. You find yourself praying to a God you weren’t sure was even there. The god you once thought you spoke to in the warm glow of a Christmas mass. The light streaming through the stained glass, throwing color onto the snowy fields…and everything smells like incense and Christmas trees. And everyone was so happy...

Can he hear you now? While you’re cold and alone on the floor. Praying for something real, anything, even if its painful, to crash through the open door, collide with you, make you feel something other than this horrific emptiness.Praying for her to feel something, too. But now, eyes glassy, you’re too old to believe the fairy tales of childhood. And so the tears come. And you can try to understand how and why life works the way it does. But in the end you won't...so you simply hope. 

For her sake, for those before and after, for all the fear we feel stretched between us, past the generations and race, and cultures I feel it now. Igniting something like the will to live, the desire to move forward, I feel it. Burning in the tear tracks on our faces, and the cuts on the back of heels and the sad smiles we share when we are confronted with death. Maybe our blurry visions of the pearly city aren't so far off... maybe heaven is just the feeling of being safe after this world dissolves around us, or the idea that while we make the actual journey by ourselves, we won't be alone. I don’t have any real answers.  And now I know, realistically. I don’t know for sure… but I hope.