We put Rivkah to sleep on Friday afternoon, and brought her home in a white box with a pink lid to bury her in the backyard. Now she is out there, a dozen feet from the door where she used to sleep in a sunbeam, and I piled laundry where her food bowl used to be and every single one of us coming downstairs for breakfast this morning looked over at the balled up sweatshirts and thought it was her, sitting there, eating.
I posted about her death on my Facebook wall, as one tends to do. I put a letter there that I wrote her and recieved many heartfelt condolences. One co-worker posted a poem called "Waiting at the Door." It rhymes like a greeting card, and the sentiment should be schmaltzy, but the essence of the poem is that the cat that is no longer waiting at the door when you come in your house will be waiting at Heaven's door to welcome you in when you, too, eventually die.
That's not schmalzy to me right now. It's huge and metaphysical and everything I'm wondering about, have wondered about, and will probably remain undecided about until my very own earthly light goes out. Is there a heaven? How do I feel about the whole idea of heaven? Are the people and pets you love waiting for you, in some sense? Will you see them again? Is there even any afterlife at all, or is it comforting enough to know that the world is wonderful and strange and beautiful and that the end means fertilizing the grass, and trees, and flowers, and nothing more?
I used to be a pretty fervent Christian. Sometimes I think I still might be, but that strong belief has been lost in the closet of myself somehow. I might unbury it, or I might not, kind of like the box of journals that's probably in my closet upstairs if I look enough, but who has the time? The thing is, even as a strong Christian it's not like I spent a lot of time on the heaven question. It was more about the liturgy, and giving 1,000 hours to church meetings/groups/initiatives, with some Jesus as a model for social justice, a splash of trauma-informed theology and a pinch of women in the ministry.
Then I lost my path in a very big way, in that I made some mistakes and got very, very, tired and took a full-time job and realized just how little time a full-time job plus two children, a husband, and a cat leaves for endless volunteer work in the church. And in unplugging from the church, I unplugged from God, because my relationship with God was so bound up in showing up that when I needed to sit down, I wasn't sure how to bring him with me.
All of this is to say that I sound so very different now when I frame these big questions, but it's only because I'm not approaching them the same way I used to. But I still really, really want to believe that my cat and my grandmother are going to greet me in those bewildering and unknowable moments after death. I want that, because I want to believe that someone greeted them there-- that they still "are," in some spiritual way, more than premium-grade fertilizer.
On Friday, my cat died, and on Saturday, Rachel Held Evans died. I loved her work, her writing. She embodied the kind of faith I had myself-- fractured, questioning, but still leaning ever onward towards a story we are willing to be wrong about. I looked for the exact and beautiful way she said that, but the Internet is so clogged with tributes and grief that much of what she wrote is buried underneath it.
I couldn't help but thinking that, if the poem is correct, and there are loved ones waiting at the door in heaven, that Rachel looked back a long, sad while at what she was leaving behind. She was only 37, and the mother of two little children. Who gleefully crosses any threshold leaving that behind? Could I do that, even for Jesus?
Is there a heaven, with cats and grandmothers? Where is Rivkah right now? She's in the backyard. Is that all? Will I ever know?
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