Living people get a lot wrong about the After Life. It isn’t binary Heaven or Hell but a spectrum where most people end up somewhere better than their Earthly life. There’s also a state of Abeyance where you stay if you have unfinished business. For the worst of the worst, there is Eternal Damnation which is like permanent solitary confinement.
Time and space don’t have much meaning in the After Life. However, being in Abeyance includes the ability to experience time and space if it helps with the process. There’s a kind of holo-deck like in a sci-fi show. The first time I tried it, I imagined being at Sunday dinner with my paternal grandparents. I come from a big family. I have an older brother and sister and two younger brothers, plus tons of cousins on both sides. Everybody on my dad’s side lives within driving distance of my grandparents, so at least once a month, we all show up on Sunday after church. Instead of being comforted, I got overwhelmed with sadness and anger. Knowing that I would never experience family gatherings again, and that they would never be the same for the people I love, was too much.
Now I stick with imagining places without people, like the pasture next to our house on the farm. I like to see the field through changing seasons. In the spring and summer, the pasture is sprinkled with wildflowers. In the fall, the switch grass grows to my waist. There’s a giant cottonwood tree that’s fallen and made a bridge across the creek that runs behind our house. The root end forms a kind of seat where I can lean back and look at the sky. Sometimes I imagine the pasture on a clear night and look at the stars. My dad taught me the names of the constellations when I was little, and I try to remember them now. I loved being on the farm, loved
