What to say when a sick friend asks, ‘Is there a heaven?’

Recently, a friend who's very sick asked, "Do you think there's a heaven?"

She was lying on her couch. I was sitting beside her. We were holding hands.

I said, "No."

It's the blunt answer I would have given if we'd been sipping wine at dinner and discussing the Meaning of Life, the kind of philosophical conversation she and I have had over and over for years. We've called them our MOL discussions and figured we'd be having them for a long time to come.

But all of a sudden her time is running short and in the same instant that I said no, I registered that this wasn't just another ruminative, self-entertaining MOL talk. Her question was urgent, and my answer felt wrong.

But what was the right answer? The right way to answer?

After former first lady Barbara Bush's recent death — coincidentally three days after my friend asked me this question — her husband, George, the former president, issued a statement saying, "We have faith that she is in heaven."

Her son, George W., echoed his father's faith.

"She truly believes that there's an afterlife," he said, "that she'll be wonderfully received in the arms of a loving God and therefore did not fear death."

It's a comforting belief. My mother had it. At least I think she did, though in the final weeks of her life, she seemed to be seeking enlightenment beyond her familiar religion.

One night toward the end, when I was lying next to her as she drifted off to sleep, she mumbled, "Honey, can you explain Buddhism to me?"

I assured her, regretfully, that I was not qualified.

Is there a heaven?

Stephen Hawking, the legendary physicist who recently died, called it a fairy tale, and he was a genius. All I know is that that I'm not convinced there is, and it would have violated the spirit of my relationship with my friend to start lying to her now just to comfort her.

But I did want to comfort her, so as soon as I'd said no, and heard how bleak it sounded, I said something else I think is true:

We don't know what this life is, so how can we know what comes after it?

Think of every flabbergasting thing we've seen and learned in our relatively short lifetimes. Who could have imagined that one day people would speak into a tiny, untethered machine called a cellphone and have their voice transmitted across the planet? Or type into that same tiny machine and send written words across the ether? Or consult a thing called Google and learn, in the time it takes to type "heaven," how every religion in the world defines that word.

Think of our constant discoveries about bodies and minds and the universe, discoveries that reveal our vast ignorance of almost everything.

Maybe, I suggested, the best we can hope for is the consolation of mystery.

"That's a good way to think of it," she said, and closed her eyes.

I've been with several people toward the end of their lives and every one of them talked about what came afterward. A couple seemed certain there was some happy new place. A couple of others, like my brother, saw only doubt on the horizon.

We, the living, hope that the people we love die without fear, but no matter how peaceful they seem, how can we know?

A couple of days after our discussion of heaven, my friend, lying in bed, asked a different version of the question. We'd been talking about many other things — work, love, family, memories, that trip we took to Paris right after she got married — but it circled back to this:

"What do you think happens to us after we die?"

I still didn't have a good answer, the answer I wanted to offer as pain reliever. But I told her what I could honestly say, that as the people I love vanish from my physical universe, I'm drawn, in defiance of my beliefs, to the images conjured in songs and stories of the dead who have gone not to heaven, but to that otherworldly place called "home," who have crossed a mythical river to some mythical "other side" where their loved ones are waiting with a welcome banner.

I managed to muster the wisest words I know on the subject, the lyrics to a song by Iris DeMent:

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from

Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go

When the whole thing's done

But no one knows for certain

And so it's all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be

"Let the mystery be," she said.

And then, unable to turn my back on her, I backed out of her bedroom, both of us knowing that, absent a miracle, we had just had our last discussion of the Meaning of Life.

Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at mschmich@tribune.com.

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