Living with the Dead
by: Jon Crane

Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 1, No. 18 (September 12, 1998)

Outside my apartment building, there's an ancient crepe myrtle tree, twisted and gnarled from improper and inconsistent pruning over the years. After Lana died, night after night, I would stand under that tree and talk to her. I'd talk to her as if she were still here, in this life, as things had been.

Once or twice, I encountered her under the limbs of that old tree. When I say "encountered", I don't mean an apparition. It was more like a meeting, a coming upon, an assurance of her presence. It's happened other places and times as well.

I haven't, however, been as lucky as Sarah, Lana's ten-year-old daughter. The week before her birthday last July, Sarah told me she awakened one night to the feel of something touching her head. Opening her eyes, she saw her mother sitting on the bed next to her, stroking her hair as she used to do when Sarah was sick.

Sarah went on to tell me what Lana told her, then said something that added credence to her vision. Lana gave her a message for me. Had this been solely the imaginings or dreams of a child desperately missing her mother, it would have been about her and no one else.

Do the dead come back to us? Do they watch over us as do the saints and angels? In Church history, there are many documented cases of saints appearing to people on earth. These were once living men and women, like you and me. Of course, with God all things are possible and this leads to a more interesting question. What will be the state of affairs between us and our loved ones when we arrive there?

We console ourselves after a loss; we tell each other that we will one day be reunited with our loved one in heaven, that he or she is waiting for us. But will it be as it was here? Even if you believe in a local heaven, i.e, an actual, real place, will it be green meadows or golden streets through which we and our beloved will stroll? Will we continue the love and joy we shared together on this earth? Scripture does not promise us this. It promises us only complete and unbounded joy in the presence of God forever, which is something more than our limited human minds can imagine.

In life as in death, God must be first in our lives. Our desire to become a true son of God must be for His sake because that pleases Him. He has told us as much many places in Scripture. Our desire to be united with Him in eternity also must be for His sake, and not our own. But what does this mean as to the original question--do the dead long for us; will we be reunited in some semblance of our earthly relationship? I don't know.

Let's say for a moment, we will be reunited with those we love and there will be a continuance on another level of what we shared in this life. There is only one way open to me if I want to be reunited with Lana, and that is the path to God through salvation. This presents a problem which C. S. Lewis addressed in his grief for his beloved wife. We cannot use God as a path: He is the end.

Therefore to arrive at the place where Lana is now, I must love God more and want to be with Him and not care if I ever see Lana again. Such is the dilemma God presents to me. It may be that the departed who are in God's presence are in such joy that there is no longer any need of the things of this earth. It is, however, precisely that thought which solves the dilemma. Whether or not we will be united in a semblance of the human love and companionship we had in this world, what greater wish could we have for those we love than to want them eternally in the joy and bliss of God's company? Isn't that what we wanted for them all along?

At the end of the film Ghosts, Patrick Swazye's character tells his wife, as he is about to depart for heaven, that we get to take the love in our hearts with us. I believe that, if I believe nothing else, because that love we share for each other in this world comes from the Divine Heart and, ultimately, returns to Him.

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