Surprise ending: imagining heaven

DOES ANYONE even think of heaven apart from the experience of loss? My guess is no. The land of the living is so preoccupying that it takes some radical disenchantment to get most of us to entertain anything beyond the here and now. Or to put it another way, somebody has to die before the hereafter comes up.

At least that is how heaven entered my little world at the age of three when, without warning, she disappeared. One day, the octogenarian lady who bore my father during the reign of Edward VII--who wore hats with plumage and made the sweetest tea--was suddenly no longer at the door of our apartment at mid-afternoon, ready to pour sugar and play games. Where was she?

With my father in England and my mother left to cope alone, the fact of Grandma's death was judged to be too much for me to bear. But something had to be done: I kept asking where she was, kept looking in all the places where she used to go when we played hide and seek. The solution was to take me out on the fire escape at nightfall and have me look at the brightest star in the evening firmament. That's where she was now--with God, twinkling down her love for me from her new home in heaven. I no longer had to hunt for her in closets or behind the sofa, Anytime I wanted to visit, all I had to do was wait for evening: she was only a star away.

Inevitably, there comes a time to put away childish things, and Grandma as celestial body was certainly one of them. No more twinkling stars. Heaven itself began to seem suspect. Not that I came to disbelieve what the creed speaks of as the "life of the world to come": who wouldn't want more life or another try at a world, especially if it meant being "embraced by the light" as one heard about from countless near-death stories? The sure and certain hope of the resurrection that was promised, however, was never spelled out. The souls of the faithful were lost in the abstractions of "joy and felicity," everyone somehow at God's right hand where "there is pleasure for evermore." So the Book of Common Prayer has it when, at the graveside, the priest does his best with what is essentially a blank slate--a destination that doesn't seem specific enough to warrant a single Michelin star.

The 1980s and early '90s turned out to be a prolonged putting away of childish things, a drawn-out memento mori. The church bells of my parish in the West Village tolled for a generation of gay men and provided the rest of us with a lifetime's worth of graveside assurances. AIDS cut through my world like a scythe. Oddly, my faith in the church strengthened even as I wavered in my thinking about Providence. The burial service in particular cast a much-appreciated sober light, and in its lack of sentimentality it made living through those days easier simply by telling truth: "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." "In the midst of life we are in death."

What more could be said? Paul on the resurrection body? Jesus on the many mansions of the Father's house? The psychedelic throne room of Revelation or its cubed jewel box of a city in which every tear is washed away? No. The last thing I wanted was theological discourse or any received attempt at the picture perfect. Perhaps I was overtaken by a cranky refusal to be comforted; in any event, most of the efforts to do so--and in this regard "sympathy" cards are the worst offenders--seemed cheap and offensive.

Then there was Longtime Companion, the 1990 film that coincided with the death of my 35-year-old partner, Luis Varela. I felt as if I had been given a gift when the funeral in the movie turned out to have been shot in my New York parish, in the same sanctuary where Luis had been welcomed (on the basis of my faith, not his own) as a lamb of God's flock. "Receive him into the arms of your mercy," the priest had said, "into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light." But as opposed to everyone around me in the theater, I rejected the vision of a Fire Island reunion of the living and the dead that brought the film to its conclusion. Talk about childish things! Yet there was not a dry eye in the house except for my own.

Let's face it, I felt like saying (but wisely did not), "Our beloveds are not going to rise from the dunes and, looking fabulous, rush into our open arms at water's edge." I could not bear the "all manner of things shall be well" of it all. Hadn't everything irrevocably changed? To resist the fact that it had, that the dead as we knew them in all the old familiar places were gone, was just fantasy. I wanted nothing to do with it.

AND THEN, AS PART of the long dirge of that period, my father died after a long bout with Parkinson's, and at the untragic age of 81. By this point my parents had relocated from New York to New England; the family had also dwindled to a handful of people I hardly knew. No one had gotten around to organizing a proper funeral, and yet I felt, out of some very primitive sense of what the dead are owed, that something needed to be done. I asked the parish priest of a church in New Haven if the next Saturday 9 a.m. Eucharist might be offered in memory of my father. I was not Prince Hamlet with a paternal ghost to assuage, but somehow it seemed important to lay Dad to rest, perhaps especially since I felt that I had failed him in his last years (or maybe all the years that preceded them). Ours was not a father-son relationship made in heaven.