Having just lost my grandfather and being middle-aged myself, I’ve been experiencing existential angst and theological soul-searching lately. As a child, I never considered mortality, except to be sad every spring when baby birds would fall out of the nests in a too-small niche over our front porch and perish. It always touched my heart but never in a this-is-the-fate-of-all-things way, and never applied to myself or people I love. But during my first life crisis on the eve of my twentieth birthday (yes, I am just that tightly wound), things started looking different and have ever since. Of course, all these anxieties
and ponderings lead to frequent contemplation of the afterlife. Does it exist? What does it look like? Is any particular group right? You know, the usual. These questions inevitably lead to considering the concept of heaven and its components. Supposing for a moment that there is an afterlife and we spend it in heaven, I haven’t yet figured out what all of the elements of my heaven would be but I do know two of them: I will get to spend just the right amount of time with people I cherish and someone in charge will, for the first time in my existence, answer all my questions, openly and unflinchingly, to my satisfaction. In Patrick McDonnell’s Just Like Heaven, loaned to me by my cat-loving friend, Marguerite, the characters from the comic “Mutts” experience what they think is paradise…and it looks like all the things they love.http://muttscomics.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Just-Like-Heaven-Mutts-Childrens/dp/0316114936
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