LETTERS FROM HOME: OVERCROWDING IN HEAVEN: MYTH OR REALITY?

Feb. 8, 2001

Dear Leslie,

My grandmother Ruby turned 95 last week. The waitress at the restaurant where the family gathered for her birthday celebration said she didn't look 95.

Not many of us know or will know what 95 feels like. Ninety-five often looks like a ghostly figure wearing a terry cloth robe in a nursing home.

My grandmother still lives at home and does for herself. She shops at the mall, a place usually frantic with teen-age energy. DC and I gave her stocks for her birthday because she likes to keep track of the financial news. She watches C-SPAN and is upset about the grilling given John Ashcroft before he was confirmed as attorney general.

After we retired to my parents' house for birthday cake and coffee, Grandma blew out all the candles in three tries. Most people just glance at birthday cards to find out who gave the present. My grandmother reads each message, sometimes aloud.

Her daughter-in-law, Jayne, gave her a scrapbook filled with old photographs. There was grandma in a flapper dress. There were her small daughters, my mother and my aunt, riding the pony an entrepreneur selling rides brought to their neighborhood.

There was grandma's father, William York, in a casket. Seeing that reminded me of the family story that we're supposed to be related to Sgt. York, the WWI hero.

"Oh pfaw," Grandma said. "I don't know how that ever got started."

Families have lots of stories. Memories, too.

There in the scrapbook was the obituary for Virginia Hill, one of my mother's most beloved friends and one of the most alive people I've ever known. She was only 59 when she died.

Somehow, the conversation turned to heaven.

Given all the people who have died through the eons, my father wondered whether there's enough room left in heaven for those still to come. For him, getting into heaven is not a theological question or even a philosophical one. It's a question of space.

He envisions heaven as finite. If so, he has a point. After all these centuries of wars and famines, the wait at the Pearly Gates must be an eternity.

Hell might be even more crowded.

My mother has a different concern about overcrowding in heaven. She is aware of the belief that loved ones who have gone on before will be waiting for you when you arrive, but she wonders how you'd ever find them.

Overcrowding in heaven is not a quandary for Buddhism. The place you go after life is just a way station until you are reborn. Buddhists call it the bardo, the interval of suspension after death. "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" says:

Now when the bardo of the moment of death dawns upon me,

I will abandon all grasping, yearning and attachment,

enter undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching,

and eject my consciousness into the space of unborn mind;

as I leave this compound body of flesh and blood

I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

When DC and I were customizing our vows a few hours before joining you for our wedding at Lee and Sheila's house east of Carmel, I cut out a Biblical phrase that implied heaven is better than life on earth.

I told the minister I don't think there's really any difference between them. Paradise is paradise.

He smiled and said, "I don't either."

How can you count the blessings of Grandmas and believe otherwise?

Love, Sam