Dad had no doubt that heaven was waiting for him after death.
“The best part will be seeing the people we love,” he told me one afternoon. The two of us were talking in the apartment Dad kept at the top of my house. “I’ll see my parents again,” he said. “And especially your mother.”
I looked away. Dad was very sick. We didn’t have much longer together. He wasn’t afraid of what lay beyond this life, but I wasn’t ready to face a future coming all too fast. As if he read my thoughts, Dad took my hand. “The best is yet to come, Linda,” he said. “I promise.”
After Dad died I tried to picture him in heaven, but standing in his empty apartment a couple of days later I couldn’t be sure he was as happy as he imagined he’d be. I came downstairs—but not without taking Dad’s little box of favorite scripture quotations.
I searched for some words of encouragement. I flipped through printed lines from Psalms, Revelation, Exodus…none of them soothed my heart. I turned over a verse from Genesis. The card underneath was different from the rest. Plain white and written in Dad’s handwriting: “If you could only see me now!”
One day I would because the best, I now know for sure, is yet to come.
