My wife was giving our young son a bath one night when he raised a toy helicopter above his head and said, “I saw God from my helicopter.”
“What did God say?” Shelley asked.
“I couldn’t tell. His lips were moving, but the helicopter was making too much noise.”
In his bed later that night, after reading him a book, I watched Jesse close his eyes and thought maybe this was a night without questions. But then he said, “Daddy, when are you going to die?”
I hated questions like that. I was afraid of death anyway. Why was this child trying to pin me down about it? I inhaled, groped for a rational answer, exhaled. “I don’t know. I hope I won’t die before I’m a hundred.”
“Maybe a hundred and nine,” he said.
Jesse had just seen a TV report about a person who’d died at that age. I said, “I’ll live a good long time on this earth, then I’ll die and my soul will go somewhere else...to be with God. Many people call it Heaven. And I’ll wait for you and Mom to join me there.”
“Will you die before Mom?”
“Probably, because Mom’s younger than me.”
He touched my hand. “I hope you and Mom die at the same time, so you won’t miss each other.”
I felt tears come to my eyes as I kissed his forehead and said goodnight. He said, “Just stay two more minutes.” He always played this trick, and I always complied. In a lifetime, I thought, what was two more minutes.
Later I thought about Jesse’s death-together statement and whether a child could have expressed such unselfish love without help from God. Maybe he did communicate with God occasionally from his helicopter.
Many of Jesse’s questions about God and mortality occurred at bedtime in a narrow room with cracked plaster walls that were the scars of my childhood. Shelley had covered the cracks with a poster of historical locomotives, a print of a dad holding an excited child while pointing to a shooting star, a Mary Englebright print of children tending a garden, and colorful wall hangings. A mobile of the planets hung from a spackled ceiling. As I did each night, I sat beside him on his bed during the fifteen minutes that he required me to stay after our story time ended. It was ironic, I thought, that once I’d been a child who prayed in this same bedroom. Initially my prayers were the normal “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Later I prayed that God might cure my father’s mental illness, that God might prevent him from killing Mom and me and my sisters in this old house with the rattling windows. I decided God was either deaf or didn’t like me. As I matured, I prayed only when I was in trouble but was never convinced of its efficacy.
“What’s God?” Jesse asked. “Where do you go when you die?”
I didn’t know how to respond to a three-year-old’s inquisition about the deity. Rabbi David Wolpe, the author of Teaching Your Children About God, says, “When a child asks a question about God, they are not coming to you as a blank slate. They already have thoughts. It’s more valuable to evoke what they think than it is to insert something and pre-empt their own thoughts.”
Jesse’s incessant questions were nerve-wracking, as if the lack of a scientific explanation meant I was a failed parent. “If you fly into space, will you see God?”
Shelley told him God is both internal and external. This confused him. He said, “You can feel Him, but you can't see Him? Right?” On one bathroom occasion, he and I were shaving together and brushing our teeth when he claimed we did the same things, because we were made by the same company. “We’re all made by God. He’s the same company.”
I was reluctant to begin an intellectual discussion about God, or a biological lesson on how humans are actually created. I thought loving Jesse meant learning how to respond to his questions with love and compassion that I’d never known as a child. I felt troubled that I didn’t have answers that might satisfy him.
On Sundays when I was a boy, my mother drove my sister, Donna, and me to the Congregational church in our rural village to attend Sunday school. She left us there, bought a New York Times at the town’s one store, and drove home so my father could read the sports pages. In the church basement, Mrs. Firmin taught us that God loves little children. She said His son, Jesus, loves little children. We sang about how Jesus loves us. I didn’t understand how God and Jesus could love me. Jesus was dead, and God didn’t know who I was. Mrs. Firmin said God was everywhere and knew us all and would protect us. But I wasn’t sure whether God heard my night prayers. If He did hear me, I wasn’t sure He had the power to prevent my father from going haywire as he had while arguing with Mom, accelerating our old Pontiac to ninety miles an hour and threatening to kill us all. I hadn’t understood what God’s love meant then and was no wiser about it as a parent.
Jesse was born after medical science said Shelley’s many surgeries meant she probably couldn’t have kids. So I believed God might have intervened then, if just to prove doctors were neither infallible scientists nor prescient gods. Shelley and I didn’t read the Bible or teach Jesse any rote prayers. We simply held hands and closed our eyes for a moment before supper. I told Jesse that we used this time to thank God for all of our blessings. I suspected he thanked God for cheese pizza.
One day Jesse insisted on seeing a dead mouse that I’d trapped in the cellar. He looked it over, but didn’t say much until bath time. “Does a mouse go to mouse heaven?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Does a mouse go to the same heaven cats go to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do cats and mice go to the same heaven we go to?”
“I don’t know...I’ll let you know when I get there.”
“Can you do that? Let me know when you get there?”
“I don’t know...but I’ll try real hard.”
Shelley said, “In heaven, people don’t communicate by talking...they communicate by thought. I read that somewhere.”
“What about communicating with someone on Earth? If Daddy doesn’t talk, how will I hear him?”
“I don’t know. If Daddy gets there first, he can let us know.”
“Will you get there first, Dad?”
I pretended I was preoccupied with washing the dishes. “I don’t know.”
“If you get there first, will you let us know?”
“Yes, I’ll try real hard to let you know.”
Shelley took him into the bathroom, the door of which was located next to the kitchen sink where I worked. I could hear him continue to interrogate her as she gave him his bath. Suddenly she bolted from the bathroom. As she passed me, she whispered, “I can’t take it anymore.”
When he emerged, I explained the difficulty of answering questions about heaven, because we knew about it only from books written by people who said they died for a few minutes, went to heaven for awhile, and came back because they were still alive.
“How did these people know they were in heaven?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there was a sign there that said heaven on it.”
“Dad, how do you spell heaven?”
What was I thinking when I told Jesse this stuff about heaven? Was it important to give him a simple stock answer, the traditional viewpoint, instead of “I haven’t got a clue?” I wished sometimes I hadn’t mentioned heaven. Maybe I was telling him what I wanted to believe instead of saying I didn’t know what came after death, if anything. That I didn’t feel a bible thumper’s conviction about the afterlife made me something more egregious than a Doubter. It made me an incompetent father afraid to present my son with feelings of doubt and insecurity. Dads were supposed to know everything, and so I tried to hide those feelings.
Jesse is thirty-six now and has been flying small planes for a couple years. On one of those flights he sent photos of an older Mooney M20 plane that a retired gentleman wanted to sell. After having the plane inspected by a trusted mechanic, Jesse purchased it. But not long afterward, he was taking it for a short flight just west of Albany when the engine began to lose power. He was able to fly it another hour and land at his home airport before any catastrophe. Although Shelley and I were shaken when he called to tell us, I want to believe my sister, Donna, still protects him as she did during his racing years. When Jesse was a small boy, she’d recorded NASCAR races and watched them with him whenever she visited. Though cancer took Donna’s life too soon to see him race dirt bikes and Mazda Miatas, I became convinced God had appointed her to be Jesse’s guardian angel during his days of spills and crashes.
It has taken many years for me to find God’s love in a society that has many different viewpoints of the deity. He has helped me survive cancer and a heart attack. He has allowed Shelley to survive a heart attack. I am now confident He will be with Shelley and me when our final day arrives. Maybe, as Jesse wished years ago, God’s final act of love might be allowing his mom and dad to hitch a ride to heaven at the same time.
Kurt Schmidt’s work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Bacopa Literary Review, Discretionary Love, Barzakh Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Storyhouse, Please See Me, The Examined Life Journal, and others. He is also the author of the novel Annapolis Misfit (Crown Publishers). He lives with his wife in New Hampshire and is currently finishing a 30-year memoir about parenting a risk-taker. www.kurtgschmidt.com