The stories we tell... - Quest for Meaning

September 1, 2011

01 Sep 2011

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…of heaven and hell are not about how we die, but about how we live.

Two summers ago, [two of my children,] Woolie and Zach were badly burned when the gasoline my cousin George was using to ignite a pile of backyard brush essentially exploded in their faces. Being burned in a fire is one of the classic images of hell, and it’s a pretty powerful one. Being burned hurts a lot.

As I drove my burned loved ones to the hospital, I had the 911 dispatcher on the cell phone. She kept asking me whether anyone was having trouble breathing. What she knew and I didn’t was that if George and the kids had inhaled the scalding air at the moment of ignition, the insides of their lungs would begin to swell and shred, and they could die very quickly.

So she kept saying, “Are they breathing?” And I would hold the cell phone up in the air, so she could hear the hellish sounds of them cursing and crying.

George was cursing and crying because his burns hurt and because he knew that the fire that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault. He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire, and his was the hand that struck the match.

“Are they breathing?” the dispatcher said, and I held up the cell phone.

George, beside me in the passenger seat, said, “Oh my God. Oh hell.

I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”

Zach was sitting behind him in the backseat. In the middle of his own loud litany of “Oh God” and “Oh hell,” Zach leaned forward. He reached out with his burned arm, an arm blistering and shredding before my eyes, and [he] put his burned hand on George’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, George,” he said. “We love you.”

If you are living in love, you are in heaven no matter where you are. May heaven hold you. May you always, always, live in love.

From Here if You Need Me, published by Little, Brown and Co. in 2007. Rev. Kate Braestrup is an author and UU community minister who serves as a law-enforcement chaplain in Maine.