hey say that heaven is the people you love, but it’s more complicated than that. I died two years ago and let me tell you, heaven is a giant mess. Sure, there are the people that I love all around me. But when I say “all around me,” I mean all around me. I can’t turn one way or another without seeing one of them.

My mother, God bless her soul, gave me everything she had, and she has to remind me of it all the time.

“Joanna, I hope you taught your daughters to fold laundry properly. It’s important for children to look clean and tidy when they’re at school. It sets the tone for everyone to treat them well, from the teachers down to the other students.”

I explained to her that my daughters have machines that fold the laundry for them. They simply put the dirty clothes into a hamper, and while they’re sleeping, the machine washes, dries, and folds them, and even returns them directly to their dresser drawers.

“Well, I suppose that’s possible. But did you teach them to eat healthful foods and make sure they don’t indulge themselves? They have to watch their figures.”

“Mama, these days, they ingest tapeworms that eat any excess calories. And vitamins in case they don’t get enough of those. And at night, while they’re dreaming, they get electrical shocks to keep their muscles in good shape without even doing any exercise.”

It was amazing to me that she could walk around as a spirit and not notice all the changes that were happening in the present-day world. Heaven was literally on earth. There were living bodies all around us, but the spirits outnumbered them vastly. Billions of spirits crowded around the ten billion living flesh and soul people, and yet they acted as if heaven and earth were completely different places.

You imagine when you’re still alive that the spirits that have gone on before you are watching over you, enjoying the parts of life that you enjoy, cheering you on when you’re struggling, and marveling at all the new things you get to see unfold. But Mama hadn’t seemed to do any of that. She was too busy dealing with her mother, and her mother’s sister. And her mother was busy dealing with her mother before her. Nagging, nudging, hinting, pushing, judging, and tsk-tsking all the way.

My father died when I was only four years old, and we don’t have many memories of each other. That seems to help, in a way. He likes to sit and talk to me about his own childhood, his father, his life before he met my mother. He tells me about the other women he nearly married. He talks about his sex life before and after he was married. He is very blunt and unembarrassed about any of this.

Sometimes my father wants to hear me talk about my life, though I am not sure that he really listens much. He leans back against the ground, puts his arms on his chest like a corpse in a coffin, and closes his eyes. It made me laugh out loud the first time he did it, which made him open his eyes and ask what was wrong.

When I told him, he said, “It’s hard to sleep in heaven. Everyone is so busy.”

The “work” people did in heaven was making lists of ancestors and descendants. Do you know how many grandparents one person has? It’s not just the parents of your parents, which you may or may not have known in life (that’s four, by the way). But all of them have parents (times two each generation), and on and on forever. They all think you belong to them in some way, even if you’ve never seen them before.

If you think there must be something better to do in heaven, I haven’t found it yet. Yes, I watch my living children and their children (the two who have any). But I’ll tell you honestly, it seems the same day after day.

What about my husband, you ask? Yes, John is here, too. I loved him dearly when we were alive, but I admit, we didn’t have the perfect marriage. We annoyed each other sometimes. We hurt each other more often than that. We hid things we were embarrassed about or didn’t want to get in trouble for doing. We fell in love with other people now and again, though I know we shouldn’t have.

I learned patience from John. He learned about passion for beauty from me. These are both useful lessons to have in heaven, I assure you.

Because of his patience, John never complains about being bored. He feels no need to go to every corner of the Earth to see what it might be like to be dead there. He isn’t interested in learning new languages or spending the rest of eternity trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe. He’s content to sit and do nothing at all.

It makes me want to hit him, but it’s true what the scriptures say about heaven; there is no sorrow and no pain. I miss both of those with an acuteness I cannot describe.

“Do you want to paint?” John asked me one day. “I’ll find some brushes for you. And canvas. Surely there has to be something spiritual that can work like a canvas. And paint—I don’t know how, but I could find it for you.”

I told him he didn’t need to do that, but he insisted. He is a good man.

But after a long time, all he found was Vincent Van Gogh.

The great artist was still missing his ear in heaven. Not that he’s the only one, but most people who have some disability in life are whole again as spirit dead. The blind can see; the lame can walk; the deaf can hear again in heaven. The aged are young again and those who died young are aged up to full maturity.

But there are a few whose spirits cling to certain aspects of their mortal selves: men who fought proudly in wars and suffered injuries, and some who were born with defects and think them part of who they are still.

Van Gogh was one of the rare spirits who seemed to have no awareness that he was dead and that his life of pain was over. He didn’t realize he had become famous; that his paintings were world-renowned. He muttered to himself and wore torn clothing and painted with his hands even where there was nothing to paint with.

I wished even more when I saw him that there was canvas in heaven.

“I wanted to tell you how much your work inspired me,” I told him instead, as his eyes widened and he began to paint some detail that I could not see. “Your art taught me to paint what was inside of me, rather than what was outside. You taught me to dare to do something different, to paint the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. You taught me that painting was meant to please me first and foremost.”

He did not hear a word.

I looked to John, who shrugged.

“How did you get him to come?” I asked.

“He doesn’t care where he is. He’ll go anywhere he’s pushed along. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but I didn’t think it would do much harm. If I hadn’t found him, after all, someone else would.”

I could hardly bear to see the great artist like this and eventually, John took him away. Van Gogh had become a museum of mortal life, a brilliant genius who could not move on to the next stage. What place was there in heaven for a man like him?

“I’ll keep looking for paint and canvas,” said John.

I couldn’t understand how God could expect us to live in heaven forever without art. We could enjoy the beautiful art that living people were still making, and that we had already seen. We could spend years in museums, seeing everything that we hadn’t had a chance to see in our lifetimes. But it didn’t mean as much because we weren’t alive. The art had been made for people who were living and dying, not for us.

And where was God? Wasn’t that the very definition of heaven, that it was where God was?

Since we’d died, we hadn’t seen God even once. I asked John about it, since he died a few years before me, but he shook his head and pursed his lips.

“I heard He’s busy. There are other worlds and other kingdoms of heaven He has to organize. Some of the oldest spirits claim that they have seen Him.”

“What’s He like?”

John shook his head. “Glorious, I suppose.”

All those songs that were written about the wondrous presence of God, all the paintings that attempted to depict His face, His light… and He wasn’t even in heaven.

“Do you ever wish that we weren’t in heaven?” I asked John one day.

“Yes,” he admitted.

That was enough for me at the time. I didn’t pester him. I had learned some patience.

It was a year later, when Mama was refusing to speak to me because I had told her about one of the other women my father claimed he had been in love with.

“Where is Hell?” I asked John. “Do you know? Can we go there?”

“I’ve seen it,” he said.

“And?” I asked. It was the first time I had felt even a hint of impatience since I had died.

John shook his head. “It’s not a good place. The people there are still suffering. They’re still living, I think, in some way.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. “They’re not in some burning fiery pit, are they?” I tried to think of different versions of hell I had been taught about when I was alive. Were any of them real?

“No, of course not. God wouldn’t do that to His own children.”

But what about us? What if I thought I was in heaven, but was really in hell? Was that why I hadn’t really seen God? For weeks, I wandered around heaven, trying to decide how you could tell the difference between heaven and hell.

“What if we’re in hell already?” I asked John.

He had just come back from visiting his mother, who refused to move anywhere to visit him, even when there was no flesh to move from here to there. I hadn’t gone with him because his mother had never liked me, and as far as I could tell, that hadn’t changed when she died.

I’d never have pegged her as someone who would go to heaven. She’d always been too selfish and mean.

“We’re not in hell,” said John.

“How do you know? How can you be sure unless you’ve been?” I didn’t know if I had the courage to figure out what hell was like on my own.

But John said nothing, and I realized he was holding back on me—that he had been ever since I died and met him here.

“Tell me what hell is like!” I insisted.

He refused again and again which became a big thorn in our relationship. I would go days without seeing him, wandering through heaven, trying to avoid the people I loved because I was desperate for someone new. I was so tired of the people I loved.

I wanted to hate someone. Anyone.

I wanted evil.

I wanted selfishness.

I wanted war and pestilence and famine.

I wanted pain and sorrow again.

Most of all, I wanted to meet people I had never met before. I wanted people I wasn’t related to in any way, people who looked right past me even when I was standing right in front of them. I wanted people who were doing things for reasons other than patience and love.

“I don’t belong here,” I told John some time later.

It was after one of our daughters had nearly died of cancer. We had spent days with her spirit rocking back and forth between our world and her own. I had pushed her back to life every time I could, and I wondered if I had done the right thing when she ended up back in the living world.

Some of her children had prayed for her to die, but I didn’t want her here. She wouldn’t be happy with me around all the time, or me with her. I knew that much.

After that, I wondered if she had prayed that I would die, when I was in that nursing home. She’d come to visit me dutifully every Sunday, smiling and saying she loved me. But had she? Was she lying all that time?

It was all of those things that made me convinced I shouldn’t be in heaven. I didn’t deserve to be with the people I loved. And they didn’t deserve to have to be with me in my misery.

“Tell me where it is,” I said to John.

He hadn’t even argued with me when I told him I didn’t belong.

“It’s right here,” said John, waving around us. “Heaven and hell and living and dying, all in the same place. Can’t you see them?”

But I didn’t see them. Who was I supposed to see, anyway? There was certainly no fire or brimstone, no cries of agony or pleas for release.

“They won’t let themselves come to heaven, even though they must see parts of it all around them,” said John.

“But who are they? Are they people who had no families?”

“There’s no one who has no family, as you well know,” John said.

I guess he was right. Everyone came from someone, even if they didn’t know who it was, at least on Earth. Here, no one could possibly be ignorant of those relationships, even if they wanted to.

“Then what’s the difference between heaven and hell?” I asked.

“I haven’t been,” John said, shrugging. “I’ve only heard people talk about it. And once, I saw a friend of mine and I realized that he didn’t see me. And it was because he was one of them.”

“One of who?”

“The ones in their own hells, because they choose that. Because they have turned their backs on heaven.”

“So he couldn’t see you? He was cut off from everyone here?”

John refused to talk about it anymore, and I was so distressed at the idea of being unable to speak to him again that I stopped pestering him, at least for a time. But I couldn’t help myself from watching the spirits I passed each day, wondering if this one was in heaven or hell of one kind or another.

I found myself wandering far afield from my usual haunts, and it was the most alive I had felt in, well, since I was alive. I was sure I saw one woman who was unaware of the spirits around her in heaven. She seemed alone and didn’t speak to anyone. I followed her for several days, at least, and I saw no one. She spoke to herself sometimes, words that made no sense, or sometimes curses or bits and pieces from things that sounded familiar to me, though I could not place them. Books I had read and forgotten, or lines from films, perhaps.

She was a woman of mixed race, part Hispanic, part black, part white. Her hair was cut very close to her head, and she wore loose jeans that were dotted with paint the way my own work clothes had been, when I had been an artist on Earth, among the living. She was long-limbed and seemed very thin. Her eyes were dark and very large. I thought she might have been considered beautiful.

“Hello,” I tried to say to her, but she did not seem to hear me. Even when I tried to touch her spirit to mine, she only moved away, putting a hand to her side as if rubbing a bruise.

I watched her as she slept long hours, then stumbled from place to place. Was she looking for someone? Was that what made every hell the same, to be alone, even amidst billions of other spirits? She seemed even less interested in the living than the rest of the spirits were, as if she had found some way to be completely disconnected from the rest of the world.

I went back to John, thinking that I was cured of my desire to find hell. I experienced new love for my ancestors, even the ones who persisted in calling me by the ridiculous nickname I’d hated in my youth and long since outgrew. John and I experimented with intimacy, even without our bodies to stimulate and share.

And then came the day when my daughter died. It was unexpected, and not the cancer that she had been so sure would be her end. She had a simple car accident, and it wasn’t even a serious one. She bumped her head and walked away from the accident initially. The other guy had it worse, was taken in an ambulance to the hospital. The EMTs checked her out and said she was fine, though they recommended she see her own doctor as soon as she could.

She never had a chance. She died in her sleep that night and came to us.

My beautiful, sweet daughter who was too much like me. She had been nearly fifty in the flesh, but when she came to us in spirit, she was seventeen years old again. She knew just how to tease me and she didn’t spare me just because we were in heaven. I should have rejoiced in her company. I should have been happy to be with her. I should have been able to forgive her the little irritations that passed between us.

I introduced her to all the ancestors I knew, despite her constant complaints that she was bored, that she wanted to go back to living, that she missed her friends, none of whom had died yet.

“At least you’re not alone,” I said to her.

“I wish I was alone! I hate you!” she shouted at me, and ran away.

So like she had been in life. In time, maybe she would mellow. Maybe I would, too.

“She’ll come back,” John assured me.

I loved her, but while we were living together, we always fought. She’d hurt me more than anyone I’d ever known. She’d seen my weak spots. She told me once that I was just like my mother, and that her father was better than I deserved. She even whispered to me one night before bed that she hoped that I died in terrible pain.

But there were always the reconciliations that made things sweet along with the bitter. She named her first daughter after me. She’d washed my body after death and had spoken glowingly at my funeral.

And yet, here she was. This was who she had chosen to be in heaven, and I was with her forever more.

“Tell me how to go to hell,” I begged John. “I’m going to go crazy here. I’ll kill her. Somehow, I’ll be the first person in heaven ever convicted of murder.”

“You won’t kill her. It’s impossible. Heaven is the end of death,” John reminded me.

It was not the end of all kinds of pain, though, or I wouldn’t have wished for her to die. But if she did, she would only come back here to torment me again.

I was the one who had to get away. I had to escape from everyone who loved me.

I was suffocating here in heaven. There was too much love here.

“You want to be alone? Come with me and I’ll show you what it’s like,” said John.

He took me to a man who muttered to himself constantly. He had scars of war on his skin and he held out his hands as if for money, but no one ever gave it to him.

“Who is he?” I asked John.

“His name is Timothy. He’s one of the first people I ever saw in hell. I think he likes it there.”

“But he seems miserable.”

“No, I don’t think so. He’s peaceful there. I think it’s what he wanted for himself.”

“Isn’t there anyone else?”

Timothy looked like he was diving for cover from a bomb, reliving past things that I had no interest in.

“It’s his own hell, just like yours would be,” said John. But because he was patient, he took me next to his old friend, Richard.

“Who is he?” I asked. I didn’t recognize him and I thought I had known all of John’s friends.

“He was someone I knew from high school. Before we met,” said John.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He committed suicide,” said John. “When he was eighteen. He hanged himself after he got rejected from the college he’d always dreamed about.”

“Oh, how terrible,” I said.

“He was a huge snob. I never liked him much when he was alive,” said John. “But I always thought about him, later. I wondered if I could have done something to stop him.”

Timothy wasn’t talking to anyone, nor reliving parts of his own life. He seemed trapped in a bubble of some kind, where the only world was two feet in front of him. He didn’t flinch when we approached him or when John waved a hand in front of his face.

“A lonely hell,” I said.

“All hells are lonely,” said John. “That’s what makes them different from heaven, which is so full of people.”

“But do you think he was ever in heaven? I mean, did he go to hell after he decided he didn’t want to be here?” I asked.

John shook his head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t here then.”

I hung back then. After all, I had been married to John for so long that I didn’t know if I could be apart from him, not forever.

The rumors that the long-absent God was coming back to Earth grew more persistent and convincing. I thought of the images of God I’d seen before I came to heaven: light and sound and power. Terrifying and beautiful. Loving, but strict.

I listened to my daughter as she became fanatic about His arrival.

One day, we heard cries of terror in the distance. Then light so bright that we were burned by it. And the terror turned to exclamations of joy.

But I could not see Him. What was wrong with me?

John and my daughter rushed toward Him.

And I, I did not.

I do not know what became of heaven after that. I only know that I was alone, and the light was gone, as was all sound and taste and smell and touch. There was nothing in the world but me. There were no living people around me that I could see, no other spirits, no God.

It was peace. It was heaven. And it was Hell.