Anyway, so by now you might be wondering where I am, what I'm doing, if I'm alive or dead or in some other dimension or something.
Well, to be honest with you, I'm not sure.
I only got here a few hours ago and I don't know everything yet. I can, however, tell you what's happened so far. (By the way, I'm assuming I can share this with you. No one has told me not to, and I can't imagine that I'm the first blabbermouth heaven has ever seen.) So here goes:
You know how everyone keeps talking about that white light after you die? Well, that white light is the gates of heaven. At first I thought it was the light from the sign over Canter's Deli, because that's where I was walking when the car came barreling into me, but the light was everywhere. The last thing I remember on earth is seeing that MINI Cooper, and then it hit me and I flew up onto the hood and that's when I saw the white light. I kept thinking of the movie
Poltergeist
when that little woman says, “Stay away from the light!” You can't help it, though. The light is everywhere; I looked behind me, to the right, the left, up: white light everywhere. I must have looked like such a moron, running in every different direction trying to escape the light. To tell you the truth, it really felt less
Poltergeist
and more
Wizard of Oz
during the tornado scene, only there wasn't an actual tornado. Peaches was there, though, playing the part of Toto. I guess that's when the serenity started, when I realized I had my Peaches and we couldn't escape the light.
Also, don't worry about the light being too bright. You don't have to shield your eyes from the light, like if you were coming out of a movie in the middle of the day. The light is actually very soothing. Remember Elizabeth Taylor in those eighties' perfume commercials where it looked like the camera had white gauze over it every time she came on the screen? That's pretty much what it's like.
Now, remember how I was saying I was so happy I had on what I was wearing the night before instead of repulsive sweats? That's because when you get up here you're wearing what you were wearing when you died. I'm told that you get to change once you get to your home. Evidently, you have clothes at this home. (Hope they're decent.) While you're checking in, though, you're wearing what you were wearing when you died. A lot of people are in hospital gowns; a couple of people are naked. The rest are clothed. No one looks sick or has blood on them or even has a paper cut. I was sure that I'd have some black-and-blue marks. I mean, I'm sure I scraped along Fairfax for half a block before I finished. The lack of blood or cuts or bruises has something to do with being a spirit now and not an actual being, which I don't really understand yet.
So when you get up here, you're immediately put in a line. You don't walk over to the line, it's like you wake up and you're in this line, only you're not asleep; it's like all white and then boom: line. The gates of heaven are one big, huge, white space. You really do walk on clouds and air, and you can see for miles. You're not floating, you're actually walking. It sounds strange but it's true: they have gravity but they don't. I don't know, you'll just have to take my word for it. I'm told that I'll be taken to my home soon enough to settle in, but for now I'm still at check-in. I'm envisioning my home looking like a room in an Ian Schrager hotel: all modern and clean, with white walls and a great big fluffy white bed and a Bose stereo. I guess I'll report on that later, but back to the line.
Normally, lines really annoy me. This line was huge, like the worst day at the DMV times a thousand. There were like ten thousand people before me, and it should have pissed me off to no end, but since I had no idea what I was doing in the line, I wasn't flipping over it. That, and they make it really comfortable for you. There's the sense of serenity I mentioned earlier. Angels (yes, angels with wings, you heard me, the myth is true) come around with trays of hors d'oeuvres: canapés with caviar or pigs in a blanket, fried mozzarella, chicken skewers, chips and dip, crudités, bruschetta, shrimp cocktailâthe list goes on. I ate nothing. I wasn't sure what was coming next and my grandmother always said, “Don't fill up on the appetizers.” They also serve drinks: champagne, hard liquor, mixed drinks, wine, soda, fruit juices, tea, coffee. Whatever you want. I chose the champagne, which was wonderfully sweet and yet dry at the same time. I had five glasses.
Now, finally to the part about why I was glad I was wearing my outfit from the night before. I've already mentioned that I am single and was about to turn thirty before I died. For me, if there is anything I'd want heaven to have, it's a cute guy. Wouldn't luck have it, the cutest guy was, oh, about fifteen people down the line. Since you're in that line for quite a while, you get to know the people around you. I met the twelve schoolchildren from Germany who died in a bus crash. They mostly played with Peaches. I met Harry and Elaine Braunstein, who winter in Boca Raton, Florida, but are really from Long Island. They died in their sleep, from gas poisoning, because Elaine didn't turn off the oven completely. Jean-Pierre from France had prostate cancer. Mrs. O'Malley from Ireland lived to be 104 before she tripped over a gap in the sidewalk, broke her hip, and died from complications.
To tell you the truth, it was less a line and more a party. Instead of asking, “What do you do?” we asked each other, “How'd you die?” I could see the cute guy a little ways down. It was one of those things where our eyes met each other at the exact same time, and then we each turned away because we were embarrassed. When I looked back and smiled, he was looking and smiling, too. Then he walked up to where I was standing, so I slouched my black sweater until it fell over my shoulder (my number one guaranteed move back when I was alive). He was hot, mid-thirties, a full head of dirty blond hairâvery Hubbell Gardner. Fantastic eyes, green. He was in sweats and a T-shirt.
“Is that your dog?” he asked me, bending down to pet Peaches.
“Yes,” I told him, cocking my head and smiling down at him. Then I was mortified when I realized that I was flirting like I was in line for a club in LA, not in a line for the gates of heaven.
“How cute,” he said. “I'm Adam Steele, by the way.” He straightened up and put out his hand.
“Alex Dorenfield,” I smiled.
“What do you think of this line?” he asked.
“What a pain.” I winced, as if waiting in line to get into heaven was something I did every day.
“How'd you die?” he asked.
“Car hit me. You?”
“Heart attack. I was at the gym, elliptical, Crunch. It sucks; I didn't know I had a heart condition. I was only in my mid-thirties and I'm in really good shape, who knew?”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah, you too,” he said, adding, “Where were you from?”
“Los Angeles. You?”
“New York.”
We paused. Would he ask me for a date? Did people date in heaven? Where would we go? Was there a Zagat
Heaven Restaurants
guide?
“Well, I guess I should get back to my part of the line,” he said.
It was at this point that I wondered if I should have told him to get in line with me. I envisioned asking Mrs. O'Malley whether it would be all right if the hot guy cut in line next to me so I could flirt more. It seemed sacrilegious.
“Maybe I could get in touch with you sometime,” he said.
“Yeah, okay,” I answered as I noticed the Braunsteins smiling at me in that way only Jewish parents who want to see a woman get a boyfriend can.
“That is, if they have phones up here,” he chuckled.
“Yeah,” I chuckled back. Ugh, pathetic.
And then he went back to his part of the line behind the German schoolchildren and the two old guys playing poker. I looked back at him a couple of times, and he waved and I waved, but that was it. Please let there be phones in heaven.
Now, believe it or not, for a line with ten thousand people, everything moves pretty quickly. It might have been all that talking and drinking and flirting, but I swear it only took about twenty minutes. They must have really worked on that. I'm sure people have complained throughout the centuries. You finally get up to the gate, which, by the way, really is a gate, and it really is pearly.
“Hi, Alex. Hello, Peaches,” a lovely brunette angel with a clipboard greeted us. “Welcome to heaven. Check-in for you is at Building Blissful,” she continued, handing me a map. I took a look at the map. All the buildings were named something heavenly: Building Divine, Building Harmonious, Building Idyllic, and so on. That made me laugh. Heaven is so cliché.
Now I'm in some kind of waiting room inside Building Blissful. The angel told me that here I'll find out where I'm going to live. Adam was sent to Building Utopia. Mrs. Braunstein also got Building Blissful, but Mr. Braunstein got Building Idyllic.
“I'm so glad to get rid of him for a bit,” she confided to me. “If he bugs me one more time about not turning that oven off all the way . . . What more can I say? Everyone makes mistakes.”
So, now we're in this room, waiting. It's a lovely room, decorated with light blue walls and comfy butter-cream leather sofas. Looks like a clubhouse at any upscale country club. There're about twenty of us in here. Again, there's a full bar and more food. I went straight to the salad bar and made myself a vegetable salad with dressing on the side. Since I didn't have the hors d'oeuvres, I felt justified in having a salad. Mrs. Braunstein went right to the sundae bar. She nudged me as she passed. “I'm dead, why worry anymore?”
“Alex?” Another angel calls out just as I'm finishing the last of my salad. “They're ready for you.”
I give Mrs. Braunstein a kiss good-bye, and we tell each other we'll try to get together as soon as we know where we're going.
“I'll look around for that Adam,” she says. “You two made a great-looking couple.”
Seriously, that guy was so hot. Please,
please
let there be phones in heaven.
I'm blowing her a kiss as I walk out of the waiting room. The angel and I are heading out to the common area and . . . wait, oh my God, is that, is it? Oh my God, it's my grandparents!
It's Like I Died and Went to Heaven
My grandparents are here! I'm still shaking. I was told that early on, like centuries and centuries ago, everyone just met up with their family right at the gates of heaven, but it became too much of a mosh pit with everyone screaming and hugging and being hysterical. No one could get anything done. So they built these buildings like Building Blissful to keep things moving along and organized.
I'm sorry that I cut off so abruptly back there, but when you see your grandparents who you haven't seen since they died some twenty years ago, it kind of takes your breath away (no pun intended). No one even told me that they would be here. I honestly forgot that I would see them. I just assumed I was in this whole heaven thing alone.
I walked out of that waiting room, and they were just standing there: my grandmother and my grandfather and my uncle Morris.
The feeling of seeing my grandmother for the first time, with no offense to my grandfather or uncle Morris, was the most hysterical feeling I've ever known. We had been so close before she died. I missed her so much. I'd thought about her almost every day for the last twenty years and here she was. It was her, her high-pitched nasal voice, her smell of lilacs and Aqua Net hair spray. I couldn't stop hugging her. I couldn't stop looking at her. I kept staring at her face. Of course I had pictures of her in my apartment back on earth, but to see her in front of me, each line on her face, the way her red hair was hardened so perfectly into a helmet on top of her head and “high” like she'd tell the stylist at the beauty parlor when I was a kid, “The hair needs to be higher!” It was her, my grandmother, in the flesh . . . er, spirit. I couldn't stop crying and shaking.
“I missed you so much,” I cried to her.
“I know, sweetheart,” she said, “and now we're together again, and we'll be together for a long, long time.”
“Look how much she's grown,” my grandfather said, reaching his arms out to me. “She's a woman.”
“I am,” I screamed hysterically. “I am, I grew up!” And then things just started pouring out of me. “I went to the high school prom and I went to college and I moved to Los Angeles and, Grandmom, I took care of my teeth. Remember on your deathbed when you told me to take care of my teeth? I did! Look at my teeth, I never had a cavity and I brushed and flossed every day!” I screamed as I flashed my mouth at her.
“When did I ever say anything about your teeth?” She asked me.
“On your deathbed, it was the one thing you asked of me.”
“Why would I tell you to take care of your teeth?” She started laughing.
“Well, you did. You told me to take care of my teeth and then you died.”
“I must have been so out of it,” she said, dismissing the one thing I did to help keep her memory alive. “Well, I guess it wasn't the worst thing to ask of you.”
This pissed me off a bit.
“Wait a minute,” I winced. “What about the dreams? I used to dream about you a lot, was that really you in my dreams?”
My grandparents smiled at me.
“Yes, of course.” My grandmother smiled at Grandpop and uncle Morris, who smiled back at her. They really did come into my dreams. I want to ask if I can do that too, but before I get a chance I'm being passed from my grandmother's embrace to my uncle Morris's. I guess they'll teach me how to do that later. I must check in on my parents.