March 2007 (cont.)

During these last weeks, the loving response from people all around me has “held me in the light,” as the Quakers so aptly say. Many have offered the consolation of their own conviction of eternal life. I have been warmed by the care in their words, but the conviction I don’t share.

I haven’t since I was a little girl. That was when I discovered my cat where, after being mangled by a neighbor’s dog, she had crawled under our porch to die. “Do cats go to heaven?” I asked my mother. She replied, “They say they don’t. They say heaven is only for humans.” And I thought right then and there, “They just make up heaven in their minds, and they keep cats out with their minds because they don’t want them there.” And I was done with it.

I spent years struggling to embrace and be embraced by a church, but I have never, since that moment, believed in life beyond death.

Except that I look into the bright, lively, sometimes oppositional eyes of those three boys, and I know Peter lives.

And, of course, he lives in me, too. Our love for one another and our long struggle with one another transformed us both. I will never know entirely what I gave Peter, beyond some of his genes and a love for reading and, I hope, some of his ability to love others.