The Heartbreaking Way We Learn Eternity Exists

The Boston Globe

‘Why are we here?” I used to know. I used to be so certain.

“We are here to know, love, and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.” That’s what the Sisters of St. Joseph drummed into my 6-year-old head. That’s what I read in “The New Baltimore Catechism.” That’s what I recited day after day after day. So that’s what I believed.

This life is temporary. The next is eternal. Sister said. Father Finn said. My mother said.

So who could doubt?

And then I met Rosemary. We were in fourth grade when I started dragging her to confession with me on Saturday afternoons. She was Baptist. She didn’t understand why I had to stop playing Monopoly or rush out of a movie when the clock struck 4, race to church (we walked everywhere), put a handkerchief on my head, and duck into a wooden box and tell some man whose face I couldn’t see that I had disobeyed my parents three times.

I saw myself glowing on those Saturday afternoons as I left St. Bernadette’s cleansed of my sins. I imagined my soul as white as the communion wafer only the priest could touch. I wanted to die right then, ascend to heaven, and be with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

But as much as I wanted to go to heaven, I also wanted to go home to my mother and father. We had Neapolitan ice cream every Saturday night. We split a pint three ways. Plus, Perry Como was on TV.

“If people go to heaven when they die, why isn’t death a celebration?” I asked my mother. And father. And Father Finn. And Rosemary.

When did I stop asking? When did I learn why?

Where do we go when we die? “The New Baltimore Catechism” had the answer. It had all the answers. It was a guidebook to heaven.

But it was like the guidebook the Donner Party followed, written by a man who purported to know the way but had never traveled the exact route himself.

Jayson Greene’s “Once More We Saw Stars” is not a guidebook. It is not a map. It is not a “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” how-to-get-up-and-go-on list of to-dos. It is a father’s lament. It is a father loving and missing and crying out for his daughter, shaking a fist at the universe and, at the same time, begging the universe to explain life and death and the meaning of this always tenuous in-between.

Greene’s daughter, Greta, who had just turned 2, was sitting on a bench with her grandmother on the Upper West Side of New York City on a Sunday morning in May, 2015, when a brick fell from an eight-story windowsill and struck her on the head. Greta died the next day.

Jayson Greene doesn’t sugarcoat his grief. Or his anger. It is on every page, raw and real and indelible. His prose is riveting. He wrote much of this book on his phone. He wrote in the moment. And reading those moments is like stepping into his bruised and battered skin.

Greene’s anger and grief and love are primal. He screams. He cries. He holds his wife and they cry together. Why? Why are we here? Where is Greta? And how do we live without her?

At the Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, where they went for a spiritual retreat six months after Greta’s death, spirit medium Maureen Hancock told them to “pay attention to signs.” They do. The signs come. The signs buffer them. The grief remains. But it lessens.

Greene continues to weep for Greta. He always will. But he feels her now, he talks to her. He recognizes her presence. He is connected to her soul.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience. This is what philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said.

Maureen Hancock says it like this: “They’re not dead. They’re just different.”

This life is temporary. The next is eternal. Sister said. Father Finn said. My mother said.

In “Once More We Saw Stars,” Jayson Greene thanks his daughter for teaching him that eternity exists.

Beverly Beckham’s column appears every two weeks. She can be reached at bev@beverlybeckham.com.