Death, According To The World And The Way Children’s Eyes See It

I used to believe in heaven. Not so much at first; when I was sitting on the pews of my church, I would absentmindedly carve lines into the splintering wood as the priest read scripture in an engaging voice, as though he could see the glazed eyes of the congregation and he thought that raising his voice would spark the spirit of the Lord in them again. My mother would elbow me and whisper harshly to me, and I would draw my eyes back to the altar only for the process to repeat again a few minutes later.

I had a friend who went to the same church as me, a Desmond girl from school. We had never been especially close, but it was nice to see a familiar, young face in a sea of long-lined cheeks and quivering chins sagging with extra skin. She was a bright girl, funny and robust and loud in the way that made you feel as though she had known you for years even upon first meeting her. I sat beside her in church once, after badgering my mother until she reluctantly let me move up the two pews to the Desmond family row. We whispered and laughed together the entire service. We were both inattentive girls, and the droning of the homily didn’t interest us. I swore I could feel daggers staring at my back every time a snicker passed my lips unmuffled, a red-hot laser from the direction of my mother. 

I was never allowed to sit with the Desmonds again.

As I grew older I also grew more attracted to the idea of religion. I wasn’t pious by any means, but I went to church and said my prayers, and I kept a Virgin Mary statuette made of porcelain next to my bed that I adored. I believed in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. I went to catechism, was given my first communion, and learned to pray the rosary. All of this came with the knowledge that if I continued to live under the Lord and follow His rules, I would be free to go to heaven. I never questioned anything I was told about the afterlife. God watched us, and if we were good, we would go to heaven. That was all there was to it.

And then the times changed, and I matured, and then the Desmond girl died. She had been only thirteen, caught in a riptide while swimming off the bay. She had gone missing and been found in the span of a week, and the funeral was only another week later. My classmates and their parents dressed in black, and they cried, and they spoke to the picture of her standing proud at the front of the stage about how she was a good girl, a girl who would surely go to heaven. This confused me.

The same old man who glared at us when we giggled quietly in church said that she was studious, that she was a child of the Lord. The same boy who called her a whale in class was sniffling and crying into his mother’s chest. Even her parents gave a short speech about her grace, and her delicacy, and how God had taken her because she was too fragile for the world.

 I wondered if any of them actually knew her.

Time is a flat circle, and a number of years later I had receded again in my religiousness. My rosaries had been tucked in a box, I had graduated catechism, and Mary was gaining small chips in her base. My eyes went back to the tiled floor or the textured wood during services, and the lyrics to the hymns slipped my mind until I had to begin using the psalm book again during the songs. My mother didn’t try to hide her disappointment at the change. I’m still not sure if she was more upset about my crumbling faith, or the fact that I no longer believed everything she told me about God, that I had begun to be more critical of her words. I once made the mistake of remarking that the zucchetto that the Pope wore looked like a bowl turned upside down and sat upon his head. My ears rang with the lecture that followed for days afterwards, and I never dared to say something so sacrilegious again.

I was at a friend’s house overnight on a Saturday, planned specifically so that I wouldn’t have to go to service the next day. We laughed and tittered like small children again, and as the sun dipped we stayed awake. This girl was fairly new to the town, she had only moved a few years before. She never knew the Desmond girl that had drowned, didn’t know why she was given such sad eyes when she had taken the only seat left vacant on her first day. Nobody ever explained to her that the chair she was occupying belonged to another girl, and so Desmond’s seat had become Lewis’s and the town moved on.

She was pretty, and quiet when you first met her. She seemed soft, like the type to cry when you squish an ant, but as I grew to know her I found that she was sarcastic and witty, opinionated and not afraid to show it to me. She was firm but kind, and she held me as I cried when I found out that my grandfather had died in his sleep the night that I stayed over at her house.

Another funeral, the fourth of my life. I was dressed in a stiff black dress, and it itched but I didn’t dare complain. My fourth funeral, but only the second that belonged to someone I had known. The other two were a distant uncle that I had met too long ago to remember, and a backyard burial of the class hamster that had fallen off of a desk.

My finger trailed over the vibrant ten o’ clock sunrays filtering through the stained glass at the top of the steeples onto my seat. The funeral felt like hours, and every time someone came down from speaking I would hope beyond hope that it was the last eulogy, before my hopes were dashed by another person walking up the steps of the altar, their feet dragging as though they carried the weight of the world with them. 

Desmond’s funeral had been nowhere near as long, with nowhere near as many speakers, and I wondered if it was because she was too young to have experienced anything to be spoken for. 

My grandfather’s death was not sudden, like hers had been. He had been sick for a number of years, and the last time I had seen him was with an oxygen tube laced carefully under his nose and a needle feeding him life placed in the crook of his arm. He had smiled, but his stubble was grown and his voice was gravelly and I could tell when I looked in his eyes that he wasn’t fully there, that he pretended to remember more than he really did. I sat in the chair opposite his bed awkwardly, unsure of how to speak. My mother spoke to him in a soft voice, as though she were speaking to a child, and I wondered why she was acting as though he wouldn’t understand if she spoke normally. I wondered if he was frustrated with being spoken to in a voice fit for children. An hour or two passed, I hugged him, and I left. That had been nearly a month ago.

In the present, a lively man in an ill-fitting suit was trying to crack jokes, lighting up when he heard the watery chuckles from the audience. He was on some segment about a fishing trip the two of them had gone on, and I heard about how brash and lively he was back then, how he had grabbed the bass with his bare hands and laughed as it flailed hard enough to knock the canoe over. I thought of that, compared to the sickly man I had seen before.

 I wondered if I had ever actually known him.

This funeral was different from Desmond’s in another way, too. Hers had been religion and death, monotone eulogies and lifeless Bible passages. My grandfather’s funeral was about him. They never spoke of God, only laughed and cried and told about how he had lived his life, rather than how He had taken it. This was a new concept to me.

I had left the Desmond girl’s funeral feeling as though the world had gripped my heart and was dragging it down to the pavement. I left my grandfather’s feeling as though my soul was floating with the snow, slow and fluttering and beginning to change into something new.

Soon, my perception of life started to distort and melt into something I had never considered before. The boxes of rosaries were donated and my Mary statuette was put into storage, lovingly wrapped with soft cloth and old nostalgia. I was older, and I could not be forced to attend church like I had when I was young. I spent my Sundays watering plants or drinking hot tea, looking out the window and watching the lovebirds hop between tree branches. 

God became a story for me, a figure used to inspire good faith and appropriate behaviour. Heaven was only a concept to me, and I was growing comfortable with the idea that I would eventually fall asleep and never wake up.

Still, I preferred to imagine that Death was more of a benign gatherer, someone that guided you to a stepping-off point. Ghosts were too sad a concept for me and reincarnation seemed too outlandish, and so I preferred to think that Death would rather be the proud parent watching their child graduate, knowing how hard I had worked to get there and that it was time to go home. I eventually realized that some answers would never be given to me, and that I would have to wait until death to find out.

Maybe that’s too simple, and maybe I’ll change my mind in the future. But for now, here is where I stand:

I spend my days imagining if Death is a kind thing, if it might have the face of my grandfather or of a girl I once sat with in church. I wonder if she saw me live, live like she hadn’t, and if she is proud of what I am, where i’ve gotten. I wonder if, when it’s my time to die, she will welcome me with open arms, because death takes us all in the end, and there isn’t a point in judgment or malicia. I wonder a lot.

You may call me naïve, but I will continue to wonder and be the one at peace when she calls my name, and I will not have been the one who spent my life afraid that I would be condemned according to the rules of a thousand-year-old book.

Author's Note

This was written a fair while ago, and I never really went through and thoroughly checked it. This was kind of my heart song for a while, so please be kind