HOW IS HEAVEN?

 

HOW IS HEAVEN?

“It made me so sad!” exclaimed the schoolboy, firstborn and cherished, to his grandfather.

“But it already passed…” he added, while gazing at the screen that showed the father of his young mother.

“What I want to know is how heaven is, where my great‑grandmother lives?” he asked the sixty‑year‑old.

The grandfather, in milliseconds, had to decide: 

to shatter the fantasy of Abrahamic consolation 

or reveal the raw truth absent from sacred scriptures. 

“It is a realm where peace and love abound, and all are angels,” he answered tenderly. 

“Your great‑grandmother is now a guardian angel who will watch over you here on Earth,” he emphasized. 

Yet in his mind remained the truth: 

Dust you are, and to earth or ashes your body will return. 

And as for the soul: none has yet returned to tell the tale. 

The child, full of innocence, insisted on more details… 

The grandfather no longer knew what to say; he chose to preserve the illusion, as one preserves the magic of Christmas. 

Though he would have preferred to paint it with more strokes of that marvelous hope: 

a wild and musical Paradise, a kingdom of animals and plants intertwined, 

where the floor is gold for all the just, joyful, loving, and truthful. 

He loves his grandson too much to break the tradition of easing sorrows… it is heartbeat.

 

With all my love, your grandfather Franz Alberto Merino Dávila