But during these extraordinarily trying times I find it helpful to look beyond. It's kind of like losing your job but knowing you have a great IRA waiting for you when you retire. Only this is about a billion times better. (Since we're now hearing about trillion dollar budgets, I'd better make that a gazillion times better.)
There are many songs and hymns that remind us of this blessing to come. Most are overtly faith based, some are secular but imply the same message. When my husband, Ken, was critically ill and in the hospital my daughter-in-law took her hymnal to his bedside and sang "going home" songs to him. He loved this. It was calming and reassuring.
Several years ago my husband David asked that Over the Rainbow (the Hawaiian version) be sung at his memorial service. After hearing it done at an earlier service he said those words expressed his own feelings. My friend's mother had Beyond the Blue Horizon sung at her funeral.
However, we don't hear much in sermons, in a positive way, about what heaven will be like. It is, in some instances, used to (literally) scare the Hell out of us. We don't need that right now. We're having the Hell scared out of us every single day.
So I've turned back to trying to find literature that presents the sunny side of death. Because we, like King Lear, tend to wonder if it might be like an eternal bad dream.
There are many near death experience books but the vast majority are not for me. I'm too analytical for my own good and have difficultly with the woo woo stuff as well the fear factor that implies it's for just a few of those who get the RSVP. Only they don't always agree on "which few" will make the cut.
I've order a few books over the past months thinking they would be comforting to the dying but they are meant only to comfort the ones left behind. While there's good it doesn't address this time of over the top anxiety, it doesn't address our need to feel confident about the future.
So I turned back to the life after death message presented by renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Eban Alexander in his book "Proof of Heaven" which became a huge bestseller. Dr. Alexander, himself a brain surgeon, contracted bacterial meningitis and was "brain dead" for eight days. I've just finished rereading his account of what heaven is like. Not a particularly religious man prior to this experience, Dr. Alexander describes a heaven as brilliant, vibrant, estatic, stunning....(God said to him)...you are unconditionally loved, you have nothing to fear.
Dr. Alexander has since written more books on the subject. He's still sharing this amazing promise. If I ever have a near death experience, this would be exactly the same message I'd like to bring back.
Beyond the blue horizon
Waits a beautiful day
Goodbye to things that bore me
Joy is waiting for me
I see a new horizon
My life has only begun
Beyond the blue horizon
Lies a rising sun
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