Friends in high places
Last night I dreamt about two friends of mine who have passed on. They never knew each other, but as dreams go, in this one, I am talking to one of them about the other. I was talking to M (who was alive in the dream) about G, who had just died. We were discussing where she was to be buried. M said, well, she should be buried here. I said, where here? Here, she said, looking straight at me. Where I’m buried. At that moment I realized: M was dead too, just as G was, that this was a dream turning quickly into a nightmare (M had begun looking decidedly scary to me at this point…), that my real self was sleeping in my bed, and that I needed to get the hell out of there fast. Puuhhhh…I tried to scream out of unmoving lips……puuuuuuhhhhh!!!!!! My boyfriend Paul thankfully heard my sputtering and shook me awake.
I don’t know where dead friends go really. In memory and dreams for certain. My three dead friends are well-loved by me and many others, in life and in death. I wish them happy in heaven. (I can’t say the same for alive and well ex-friends, with whom I have fallen out and who thus have become dead to me, and whom I wished in my more wicked moments to go south of heaven.) But heaven is a religious mystery made certain only by faith – a choice we make in this life perhaps as our ticket to the next. Last Saturday night, in the middle of a two-and-a-half-hour long Easter vigil mass complete with five readings, five responsorial psalms and all other attendant rituals, Paul, ordinarily devout and unwavering, turned to me in mock disbelief and remarked, “You know, who’s to say we aren’t lab mice in a Skinner-like experiment.”
Who knows. I choose to believe in heaven because like many others I need a source of comfort and meaning to sustain me in this life. I remember a few years back seeing an interview clip of Ninoy Aquino* on TV in Manila, and he said that he started praying during his long years in prison, because had no choice, he had to believe in something in order to survive. Diane Ackerman in her moving A Natural History of the Senses (1995), offers a striking metaphor about the imprisonment of our souls: “…like prisoners in a cell, we grip our ribs from within, rattle them, and beg for release.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679735666/002-7473749-5655256?v=glance&n=283155
God knows we don’t lack for times when we need to be freed from life’s all too taxing realness. For me, heaven is simply a good dream, just a regular place with lots of trees, family and friends and pets a mere ten- or fifteen-minute drive away. Lots of coffee and cake and lazy days. All that makes me happy in this life should serve well enough in the afterlife I think. For now it’s enough to drive away bad dreams. Including freaky ones with beloved dead friends, whom I only wish to see again when I am dead and hopefully living in heaven.
* Ninoy Aquino, martyred Filipino National hero. http://www.geocities.com/arbdesign11/ninoy.htm
