Thoughts of Heaven have been filling my head lately.

Following Georgie’s death, I deconstructed everything that I was told to believe in.

Slowly, slowly, a new perception and world view have emerged.

I have reconstructed the world through the prism of our loss.

The world needs to make sense to me as it stands now, a world where loss and pain are very real.

There is a word we have in Romanian, “dor”. A word very hard to translate.

It is more than missing.

It is more than yearning for someone.

It is that deep, deep longing in one’s heart that can never be satisfied once someone you love passes away.

I miss my son. I yearn for his presence. I long to be with him. My being is at times struck down, literally, with the burden of loss.

So Heaven as it was portrayed to me in church, as I was growing up, does not make sense anymore.

We were created unique and savagely independent and in need of expression.

So you know what I think?

That Heaven will be what we dream it to be, in our moments of quiet and reverie and peace.

Heaven will be…freedom. Freedom to be what we were created to be. Freedom to be what we longed to be all along. Freedom to be ourselves, in all our splendour.

Heaven will be…long chats by the sea. Dinner parties with friends that will last for days. Dancing parties that will never exhaust us. Revealing ourselves for who we truly are with zero fear of rejection or misinterpretation or conflict. Complete harmony. Sentences that always find an end in each other’s hearts. Micro and macro community at its finest, its best, its most beautiful.

Heaven will be…trips into the unknown. The unknown of ourselves and of the world. We are beautiful beings, infinite in creativity, ingenuity and depth of love. Heaven will be the awesome and continuous discovery of who we really are and what this world really is. Imagine, travelling without borders or need of passports or money…Endless, spontaneous, childish giddiness of discovery.

Heaven will be…rest. Not so much physical rest but a metaphysical rest, the realisation that we have arrived, that feeling of it cannot get any better, rest in the sense of…well…peace.

Peace, deeply seated in our souls, peace, never ending, peace, overflowing.

No more striving need to achieve anything. No more torment. No more wishing for more.

A peace that our souls will know as the long sought after yearning we had while on earth.

Heaven will be…home. It will be home as we know it or wish it or dream it in our hearts. For some, it will be quiet and serene. For others, loud and full of life and family and pets and light.

For me, Heaven will be being with the people I have loved. Heaven will be being always together, cooking and eating and laughing and cuddling and reading stories and loving each other into eternity.

And God will be there, overlooking it all, smiling on us all and our little bits of Heaven.

Heaven will be love never ending.

Never parting.

Never suffering.

Never saying goodbye, ever again…

Images, courtesy of Unsplash.