“All aboard!”
My eldest daughter has figured out how to get to heaven and back.
“It’s up there,” the seven-year-old tells me, pointing up to the stars. “Way up there.”
I look up.
“I’m going to go one day,” she says.
She tells me that she will visit Tomas, our cat who died of old age last year, and she will visit Maggie, our Cocker Spaniel who was run over our first year of living on the coast. And she will visit Sofia, her older sister who is not with us, who was born still at full term, whose eyes we never saw the color of.
“I talk to her, on my own,” she says. “When I need to, at school sometimes, and when I don’t feel too good. And when I’m happy. When we’re at the beach and it’s pretty. I say, ‘Look, there’s a whale,’ and I tell her about the sea and the sand dunes and my boogie board.”
I listen and then I ask how she’ll get there.
“With the fairies. They’ll take me up and they’ll show me the way. We’ll go up, way up – right up there,” she tells me as she points up to the stars.
We look up at the stars for a while.
“That’s how I’ll get up to heaven and then back here again,” she tells me.
I think I’ll hop a ride.
This is the best – ever! It made me cry. I also love the artwork provided by your children.