Summer of 1975
My Mother’s Bedroom
“Where do we go when we die?” I asked my mother. I was seven or eight years old and we’d lost a pet that day to a car accident. Every time my small mind conjured the image of Rascal’s six-month old feline-perfect body lying still in the center of the street, my chest and throat ached with intensity to act, to do something, anything. As if in slow motion, our green Country Squire station wagon with the dark wood-paneled doors weaved around his body. My brother acted the messenger, the person who would speak the awful truth none of us wanted to believe. It’s Rascal, he’d said, and all of our hearts sank in the silence that followed. For the remainder of the day, like wiggling a loose tooth with the tip of my tongue, in spite of the sting I could not keep from replaying in my mind the discovery of our expired cat followed by the dire realization that death was a finality no human action could reverse.
“Well, Tammy,” my mother said as I stood in the door frame leading to her room, “maybe it’s time to tell you about it.”
I moved from the shadow of the dark hallway toward the nightstand until my reddened face was illuminated by the table lamp. She looked up at me for a moment, and then looked back down at the book that was laid open before her. My mother was almost always in her room, on her bed, reading church books. At least that is the childhood image I keep of her, the snapshot I have filed away.
“I loved Rascal, too. But he’s gone to a better place,” she said, still looking at her book, slowly turning a page. I sat on the bed. I’d heard this “better place” stuff before but now that a family pet was actually there, I wanted specifics.
“But where?” I sobbed. “What place? I don’t understand.”
“Oh. Well.” She turned a page in her book and smoothed it flat. “It’s complicated,” she said with a lilt. I wasn’t sure whether her tone meant it would be complicated for me to understand or for her to explain.
I sat silent, waiting.
She turned another page.
I waited.
She sighed.
“After we die,” she began, “we believe that we’ll go to a place where we will wait for the Second Coming. And then Judgment Day. But even while we’re waiting, we’ll be separated into souls who will wait in Spirit Prison and souls who will wait in Spirit Paradise.”
My mother often spoke of the Second Coming that she sometimes also called the Millennium. She never put a date on it, but I often had the feeling that it was likely to occur during my lifetime, perhaps even soon. After a period of horrific disaster – earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, storms of biblical proportion – Jesus Christ would return to earth and usher in one thousand years of peace. We were Latter Day Saints who would likely witness earth’s last days. I knew all about the Second Coming. Sometimes I stood and gazed at paintings in our church foyer that showed Jesus descending from the heavens with his hands spread open, angels with trumpets heralding his return.
“Who will go to Spirit Paradise and who will go to Spirit Prison?” I asked. “And where is Rascal?”
She paused and looked up from her book. “Rascal goes to a special place for animals. Different from humans.”
She must have seen my concern because she added further that animals were safe from judgment and would meet us after Judgment Day.
I nodded. And waited.
“So?” I said. “Who goes to paradise and who goes to prison?”
She told me that faithful Mormons all go to paradise and that everyone else would go to prison, but that I shouldn’t despair. Paradise was merely a place where those who’d already done important gospel work on earth could rest and continue being faithful. Prison was not so much like punishment as it was an opportunity for reform, a place where well-meaning spirits could study and learn all the things we Mormons already knew so that they, too, could have an opportunity to reach the highest levels of heaven after Judgment Day.
“There are levels?” I asked.
Another sigh. I remember my mother being patient with my curiosity but also hesitant to provide the details. It often felt like this with Mom. She was generous with neither affection nor information. She held back. It seemed as though she knew more than she shared, secrets not for my young ears.
“Well, more like Kingdoms,” she said.
“Kingdoms?” my eyes grew wide. I was an avid reader of fairytales and as my mother explained, I attempted to put this new knowledge in the context of a fairytale. The top Kingdom was for faithful Mormons, God, and Jesus Christ. This was the castle in the distance, forever aglow beneath the rays of the sun. The middle Kingdom was for well-meaning non-Mormons who became Mormon in the Spirit World, the happy servants to the benevolent King in my imagined world.
“My friends,” I said knowingly. “This is where my friends from school will go.”
I caught my reflection in the wide mirror above the dresser and my mother sat up straighter and looked in the mirror as well. My hair was uncombed and shaggy, as it often was, and two shades lighter than my mother’s short Betty Boop hair. One shade darker still was the hair on my mother’s wig perched on a white Styrofoam head on her dresser. The dark brown wig was styled the way she’d worn it for years, only a little fuller and fluffier. She wore it on only one occasion: performance nights with the Peninsula Symphony. On those nights, my mother appeared as though a magnified version of herself. The wig, a floor-length black dress with capped sleeves, sandals with 3-inch heels, red lipstick and even mascara all worked together to transform my simple, no nonsense violinist mother into someone I hardly recognized, perhaps the person she was before motherhood carved new priorities into her path.
But on this night, as I learned about heaven and hell and spirits and eternity, three faces looked back at me from her dresser – the curious, scrappy-looking face that was mine, the serious and passive face that belonged to the mother I knew, and the expressionless, featureless face of the stand modeling the wig of the mother I never had the chance to meet.
“Yes, Tammy,” she said to the mirror. “Many of your friends will be in the middle level. Probably. But it’s also possible that many people will go to the lowest Kingdom where neither Jesus nor God reside. People who cannot resist the temptations of earthly sin. Atheists. Liars and cheaters. Even if they accept the gospel in death if they weren’t wholesome in life they will live in this Kingdom, which won’t be very different from earth. Many, perhaps even most people will spend eternity here.”
The land that surrounded the castle, I thought. The place where people pine for something they can’t have.
“The lowest level, is that like Hell?” I asked. I’d heard about Hell from my friends at school. Burning bodies, roasting hot flames, Satan and criminals.
“Well, no,” she said. “Not really.”
Our expressions in the mirror were similar. We both wore a slight smile and a look in our eye that suggested we knew something the other didn’t know. She returned her gaze to her book and began rolling the hair near her forehead around the tip of her index finger, twirling it in the way that my father often scolded her to stop. I fixed my stare on the blank face of the wig stand.
“There is a place,” she said, twirling and twirling her dark hair, “called Outer Darkness.”
I watched her in the mirror as she closed her book and slid it under her pillow, and then rolled to her back and folded her arms over her chest, rubbed her elbows and let her hands fall flat at her sides. I lay beside her and tucked my hands under my cheek.
“Outer Darkness,” she said, blinking at the ceiling,” is a place for spirits who can never be forgiven. These are souls lost forever, no second chance, and there is only one sin this bad.”
Murder, I asked. Murder, of course, was the most awful sin imaginable. No, not murder. Murderers go to Level 3. They can be forgiven over time. Well then what, what could possibly be worse than murder? Death was on my mind. Death was final. Death could not be erased or reversed, like Rascal in the street, and to cause a death to my mind at the time, this was to play God. How could murder not send a soul to Outer Darkness?
“It’s not good to kill people, Tammy, you’re right. Murderers may likely spend an eternity in the lowest tier of heaven with no access to God or Christ or all the beauty and joy that will be available to those in higher levels. But it’s not murder that is most heinous in the eyes of God.”
She rolled to her side to face me and her dark eyes sparking from the yellow light of the table lamp. Then she told me that those who accept the truth of the LDS faith and then later deny it are the worst sinners of all. Like all of us, they’d be reunited with their physical bodies but only to live with Lucifer himself in black silence forever and ever. Her eyes were flat and emotionless when she told me that forgiveness was impossible for these lost souls.
I shuddered and then felt a strange calm. It was not to be my destiny and I felt an odd sense of pride, even pleasure, at the thought of sinners who weren’t me suffering for an eternity because they didn’t believe the same things that I believed. I blinked and another shiver ran down my spine. I wondered what it would be like to live in Outer Darkness. Images of hellfire and pitchforks and physical pain didn’t fit with the story I’d just been told. It seemed rather more like neglect and regret that might torment those souls, the torture of external silence and internal noise. Hell was to cease to exist but somehow be aware of it. Like being buried alive, I decided at the last. Yes. Outer Darkness was not like the Hell my friends envisioned with ghouls and hot lava and shrieking voices. Our version of Hell left a soul entirely lone save for the companionship of Satan.
Hell was exile.
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