I made a point of not blogging yesterday about it being the 24th anniversary – not sure anniversary is quite the right word: it sounds far too jolly and celebratory – of my mum’s death. Each to their own and all that, but I am not in the camp that chooses to wish happy heavenly greetings to dead people on social media, on the grounds that they’re … well … dead. And because I don’t do God, I don’t believe in a heaven or hell where people survive their own deaths and live forever. Even if they did, it’s quite a leap of faith to imagine dead people in heaven or hell have access to Facebook to read these greetings. But let’s just try to imagine that dead people didn’t really die and are now with God or Satan.
My mum was unquestionably a good person so I don’t think she’d have been sent down below to the fires of hell. She’s be up there in that great Scotch whisky distillery in the sky, having a laugh and a joke with her fellow dead relatives and friends. That’s quite a comforting thought, isn’t it? Because while her death was more of a deliverance (for her) than a tragedy, I didn’t want her to die in the same way that no one wants their loved ones to die. She lived in terrible pain for much of her life, which was painful for us to watch, too, and if she had managed to get past St Peter’s gates, well fair play.
I am no expert on faith or the bible and it is well beyond my level of understanding to comprehend how people get on in heaven or hell without their bodies, especially if their dead Earth bodies are mere ashes, but by further stretching my imagination I am guessing that God, if you go to heaven, restores you to a status where you are illness and disease free, at an Earth age where you can still get to enjoy whatever it is they get up to in heaven? I suppose that if you have everlasting life you’re hardly going to be stuck with a new version of dead body you left behind in the last life?
You might be thinking, “Well, you know the date on which your mum died. It must affect you far more than you are letting on?” and to be honest, it doesn’t. I only know the date because another dear relative did know and informed me when I said on here that I didn’t know the date. Time is a great healer, not least when a loved one died in the most awful of circumstances, in the case of my mum, as I have said before, chronic, untreatable pain. Perhaps, it’s that memory that has stayed freshest and not the earlier times when she was healthier and happier.
I recall many years ago reading a message on Facebook that went slightly wrong, reading something like, “Thinking of my dead mum on this the anniversary of her death.” The post was quickly amended to refer to “my dear mum“, but not before, I am afraid to say I had a brief giggle before I pulled myself together, realising that this was a comment of love and continuing grief. I don’t feel the need to send heavenly greetings on the birthday and death anniversaries of loved ones, but I totally understand how hard it is to let go and that wishing for nice things can be a comfort, even if they are not really true.
As the great comedian Dave Allen used to say, “May your God go with you.” He was an atheist, by the way.
