I was with my grandfather when he died. It now seems like something that happened in another lifetime, and in a lot of ways, it was: before Charlie, before Josephine, before our mortgage and the crushing busyness of our lives—also before the extreme joy I feel at seven-thirty each morning, when Josephine comes into our bed for a snuggle and, for ten or fifteen minutes, I try to make time stand still. This is everything, I tell myself. This is all there is.
In that other lifetime, I was a runner. It was August, and I had just come back from a long Saturday run. I was standing in my bedroom, dripping with sweat, when the phone rang. “Please come,” my grandmother said from their apartment uptown. “Your grandfather is dying.”
This was not a surprise. My grandfather had been terminally ill with cancer for six months, and we had been through all the usual ups and downs. Hospital stays that turned from days to weeks, bitter fights with doctors we considered unsympathetic or incompetent, dehydration, rehydration, deathbed reconciliations, dramatic recoveries, delusional nights, vivid and articulate mornings. By the summer he was at home, existing on Ensure, a sweet, fatty liquid like baby formula that nourishes so many people at the ends of their lives. We were lucky to be able to hire nurses to care for him 24/7—angels, my mother called them. And they were.
Through his illness, my grandfather had remained astonishingly lucid. He had always had a gift for languages, and the circumstances of his life—born in Belgium, proprietor of a business that took him all over Europe and Eastern Europe, an immigrant to America—gave him ample opportunity to practice. He spoke—fluently—French, English, German, Flemish, and Yiddish, and—less well—Spanish, Italian, and Polish. During his hospital stays, he flirted with the nurses in whatever language they spoke. He could do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ten minutes on any day of the week. My mother says he was a beautiful figure skater, though I don’t believe I ever saw him skate. He could whistle with a trill, and most often he whistled Mozart. He was, in other words, a cultured, formal, European man from a bygone age. He dismissed all talk about God or organized religion as silliness—and even teased me about my job as religion writer. Yet it was his Jewishness that had forced him to pack the car that day in May 1940, leaving everything he knew behind.
I had seen him just a few days before my grandmother’s call. He was always happy to see me. His eyes would brighten, and he’d hold my hand. His hand, which had a tremor for as long as I can remember, would be dry and warm. We’d talked that day about his childhood in Antwerp: about his family’s mustachioed chauffeur, Charles, who taught him how to drive; about the time he kicked an apple all the way to school until it was mush; about the time he picked up a stick in a field and it turned out to be a snake. We played backgammon, and he beat me.
When I arrived at the apartment that morning, my grandfather was lying in his bed with his eyes closed. He skin was waxy. He was breathing gently: his exhalations went “puff puff”—not labored, but as if he was running out of gas. Circling his bed were my grandmother, my great-aunt Anita (my grandfather’s little sister, always spoken of as the great beauty of the family), and the weekend nurse, Michelle. We all just stood there, silently. I touched my grandfather’s abundant hair, which he had always worn neatly slicked back with oil. It felt silky.
The unforgettable thing about his death is its gentleness. There was no before-and-after moment, no final cry, no eyes wide open, no last words. None of us standing there, frankly, could tell when it happened. He made a “puff puff” slightly louder than the ones before. Perhaps that was the moment. Finally, Michelle found a mirror and put it to his mouth. No fog. I touched his forehead and it was cool. That was it. My grandmother wailed, “Where is my family?” I called the funeral home.
I tell this story because in the course of writing this book, whenever I have asked myself—over and over—“Do you believe in heaven?” I always think of my grandfather. I try to visualize him. I loved him, I was there when he died; I miss him and my grandmother every day of my life. Surely, if I believed in heaven, I would see them there in my mind’s eye.
Sadly, I don’t. When I ask myself, “Where is he now?” all I see is the cemetery in Westchester, the shady hillside where both he and my grandmother were buried—he on a sweltering day, she in chill January rain. I do not envision my grandparents alive anywhere. I did not see, or even imagine, my grandfather’s spirit rising from his body that morning, and I have never felt him looking down on me. (Although I must confess that when I use the blue stew pot my grandmother gave me from her own kitchen cabinet—something I do three or four times a week—I can see her freckled hands on it, holding the rim with a battered pot holder and stirring the pot.) I do not believe in a supernatural realm where my grandparents exist as themselves, nor do I imagine them engaged in any of the activities they loved on earth: watching tennis on television, say, or sucking on hard candy and listening to chamber music at Lincoln Center. Although I do believe the world will end—everything ends—I do not believe that end will be accompanied by glorious resurrections.
Nevertheless, my experience of my grandparents’ deaths links me to my ancestors and my tradition in important ways. My grandfather was eighty-nine when he died. He had his family around him and he was buried among his people—or at least, among other New York–area Jews, who might well have been his people. His children were prosperous and had children of their own. He had heroically preserved his own lineage when he fled the Nazis. He was—as anyone in my family will tell you—our clan’s patriarch. Whenever any of his children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, in-laws, or cousins needed anything, particularly advice or money, he would always oblige. He may not have believed in heaven, but he believed in family. He wouldn’t have put it this way, but he believed that the accomplishments and honor of one generation accrued to the next, and that it was the responsibility of children to safeguard and perpetuate the legacy of their parents. He was our Abraham. He “died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.”
Also, I had a little visit from him after he died. I was a skittish bride, terrified that my marriage would somehow be a great mistake. My grandfather had died about six months before I met Charlie, and though I was sure the two of them would have liked each other, the missed connection bothered me. (Also, to state the obvious, Charlie is not Jewish and I wanted my grandfather to tell me that was okay.) Then, in the middle of the night a few weeks before my wedding, I woke to see my grandfather sitting at the foot of my bed. He looked well, the way he did before he was sick, his hair slicked back and his saggy brown eyes twinkling. He said nothing, but he patted my arm. In the morning I felt reassured, as if I’d gotten his blessing. He may not have been real, but he felt real to me, and if anyone had suggested the next morning that I pay tribute to his spirit in some way (as my Hebrew ancestors did), I would have. I did not belong to the temple at the time of my grandfather’s—or grandmother’s—death so I did not say Kaddish. But I do now, in the season of each Yahrzeit (death anniversary), bumbling along in Aramaic.
My biggest beef with the atheist writers Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—whose works I generally admire—is this: the God they set up to knock down is a straw man. They define God in the most simplistic, kindergarten terms: an omniscient, omnipotent meddler, whose inscrutable ways and insane approach to justice motivate people to great evil, or, at best, to compliant thoughtlessness. (Harris famously compares the God of Abraham to Zeus.) But while many people do believe in such a God—and, indeed, perform ruthless acts of murder and intolerance in His name—others don’t. Just a third of Americans believe in a God who controls human events, according to a 2006 Harris poll.
It may be naive to say this, but “God” is the word I use to describe what is miraculous about this life, the aspect that is awesome and defies rational explanation. Water equals two hydrogen molecules plus one oxygen molecule, yes. But…you can drink it! Fish can live in it! It fills our bodies and covers the earth! Josephine equals one part Charlie and one part me plus—a very large part—something that is just Josephine, seemingly begotten out of thin air, unlike either one of us and so very much like herself. Okay, I’ll stop. But you know what I mean.
The God of which I speak, then, is, in some sense, a creator. Not a guy who put the whole thing together like Tinkertoys in six days, but the miraculous aspect of the process of creation, the fact that the earth, the water, the animals, and the plants work together to support human life and that from human life comes creativity and achievement, and even a sense of the Divine. I’m not speaking literally here. I believe we can break down all of God’s creation into molecules, name them, sort them, catalog them, and discover their origins, eventually. All I’m saying is that there’s a “holy shit” aspect to all of it that’s worth contemplating from time to time—and when I do contemplate the places that bear the stamp of God’s creation (or inspired human achievement)—whether the great cathedrals of Europe or the landscape of southeastern Utah—I find heaven. The nineteenth-century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh had a continuing, dissatisfying relationship with the Protestant church of his childhood, of which his father was a minister. Nevertheless, he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, this did not keep him “from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.” I need not add that van Gogh’s Starry Night is one of the most supernaturally vivid renderings of heaven ever created.
Progressives like to say that God is love, and while Hitchens and Harris might sniff at that, it’s a notion that I can get behind. If God is love, and heaven is where God lives, then heaven exists in the love between people—and between people and God.
I think all the time about a woman named Agnes Long. In the early phases of researching this book, I became obsessed with the Desert Fathers, the monks and hermits who took themselves out of society and into the deserts of the Middle East in the first centuries of Christianity, where they lived in extremis—with little food and water, little conversation or companionship, just the austerity of the landscape and constant prayer and contemplation. I discovered, through my research, that a few Roman Catholic dioceses were permitting lay-people—people who had formerly had regular jobs, spouses, and families—to live as hermits under their auspices. These people would generally give away all but their most necessary belongings, and retreat to the woods or the country somewhere, to live out their lives contemplating God. I felt I needed to meet one of them, and after months of searching, I did. Agnes Long lived on Wisconsin’s Madeline Island, in the middle of Lake Superior. To get there from New York you have to fly to Duluth, Minnesota, drive two hours, and then, if it’s winter—as it was when I visited—take an ice shuttle across the lake. I wrote a story about her for Newsweek.
Evelyn Agnes Sebastian grew up a sad and lonely child in New Jersey in the years before the Second Vatican Council. Her favorite pretend game was “nun.” She made herself a little chapel in her bedroom and designed and sewed her own habits. But as she got older, it turned out she was gorgeous. Blond and curvy, she worked as a model for Sears, and before long she was married and the mother of three children. Hers was not a happy marriage, she told me, and after nearly twenty years, she got divorced. She entered a party-girl phase—she had a well-paying job, she bought expensive clothes, she went to clubs in Manhattan. It was during that phase that she met Marvin Long.
“He was the love of my life,” she tells me, and from the pages of her Bible she pulls an old color photograph. They are standing together on a boardwalk at the Jersey shore. He is tall, dark, and fit and wears a bathing suit. She wears a floppy hat and a zebra striped bikini. Together they moved to Texas—he was in the oil business—where they had a comfortable life: a big house, three cars, and a bedroom set made entirely of glass. In 1984, Marvin died of a brain tumor and Agnes sold everything and began the long, slow process of giving her life to God. In 1997, she took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and solitude, and moved into her hermitage (a tiny, prefab wooden house) on Madeline Island. When I met her, she had a phone but she rarely used it. She almost never saw her children. She spent her days painting religious icons and praying the Divine Office—regular cycles of prayers, five times a day. She ate one meal a day; her food was given to her mostly by kind neighbors. She wore a denim habit—blue, she told me, because it represents the Virgin Mary and denim because it represents the common man.
Here’s the thing about Agnes Long. She disappointed me. I had traveled all this way to meet one of the Desert Fathers (or in this case, Mothers)—a wise, older person who, I hoped, would share with me her profound experience of encountering God—and heaven—all the time. Instead I met a heartbroken woman, who lived in a depressing shack in the middle of the woods and was entirely unable to articulate what had moved her to make this obviously radical decision about her life. Where is heaven? I kept hounding her. What do you think about when you think about heaven? What do you read to think about heaven? Finally, she grew irritated with me. “You talk as if heaven is a place,” she said. “What I think of is the Lord. At different times I have felt his presence in that joy that has no reason or explanation. It comes and goes. Heaven is being totally united with God in love.”
Ah. This is something that, years later, I have come to understand in my own life, with Charlie and Josephine—our continuing struggle to be kind and respectful to one another in spite of our human selfishness. One of Christianity’s most resonant metaphors for heaven is marriage, and though I am not a Christian, this metaphor makes sense to me. In our communities, in our families, we love one another all the time as best we can, fully conscious of how difficult it is and how much humility is required. Josephine had a book when she was littler called I Love You All the Time, in which a mommy bear tells her baby that she loves him all the time, even when she’s with friends, or at work, or on the telephone, or busy with something else, or when she’s angry with him. “Even when you can’t see me,” she concludes as she turns off the light in his bedroom, “I love you all the time.” Heaven is in there, somewhere. The joy of that love is—truly—beyond anything I ever imagined.
I am a progressive in my heart, but I yearn at times for the discipline and the faith of the orthodox. I wish I could somehow “go there” and embrace the supernatural aspects of heaven—the streets of gold, the many mansions, the banquet, the Torah study, the music, the physical enjoyment of all kinds of pleasures, the bliss, the reunions. What a comfort it would be to me—and even more to my skeptical friends who have lost children. I even yearn for that literal-plus interpretation of scriptural descriptions given to me by believers who are also intellectuals. The heaven of the Qur’an “is described to us by names we can understand, but it’s a completely different experience,” says Hisham Abdallah, the Roche pharmacologist who lives in Silicon Valley. In other words, Abdallah believes that in paradise he’ll see green, green pastures as the Qur’an promises, but he also believes that those green, green pastures mean something else entirely. I wish I felt that.
What I don’t wish for—this is my line in the sand—is any certainty about who’s in and who’s out. Any sense of hierarchy among good people—one Mormon sister’s in because she obeys the rules, another’s out because she doesn’t—infuriates me, as does any Christian, Muslim, or Jew who believes that there are only Christians, Muslims, or Jews in heaven. I said as much in chapter 6: I have nothing but admiration for the evangelist Billy Graham, who had preached for his whole life that belief in Jesus Christ was the only way to heaven and then, in his last decade, softened his stance. “I think [the Lord] loves everybody regardless of what label they have,” he told my boss, Jon Meacham, in an interview that appeared in Newsweek. I hope Graham’s children, some of whom are more conservative on this matter than he was, took note.
When conservative Christian, Muslims, and Jews talk about heaven, they often use the word radical to describe what they mean. The heaven that will come at the end of the world is a radical reversal of the social and natural order. The first shall be last, the meek shall inherit the earth, the stars will fall from the sky. Heaven, for them, is not just love, it’s radical love; it’s not just a return to the perfection of Eden, but a radical return. This is no warm hug, no easy train ride. It’s radical because God is involved and God can do anything. While I do not believe in this intervening God, I do cling to the idea of heaven as a radical concept, a place that embodies the best of everything—but beyond the best. A belief in heaven focuses our minds on the radical nature of what’s most beautiful, most loving, most just, and most true. At the beginning of this book, I said I believed that heaven was hope. I would now amend that to say, “radical hope”—a constant hope for unimaginable perfection even as we fail to achieve it. As Emily Dickinson said, heaven is what we cannot reach. But it is worth a human life to try.