David shares a close bond with his eight-year-old son, Chris, but their family is destroyed when David dies. In the afterlife, he is given an opportunity. He is told that he may be granted three viewings by which to look in on his son. What David sees will not leave him, and he decides to make a simple but impassioned request.
“I can’t tell you what the angel showed me of this vast kingdom, but I can tell you what I was permitted, and it was surprising.
‘The Great Chasm between us and the world of your past can’t be breached,’ the angel explained. ‘It is a divide not just of distance but of type. You can no more go there than music can build a mountain or pain pile stone upon stone.’
He paused. I think he knew that I was thinking about Chris and about his mother. Jen, who had come so far; Jen, who had kept her head above water all Chris’s life, even to her own astonishment.
To the centre of my being, I ached to see my beautiful boy. Just to tell him he would be okay, to let him know that I was okay, and to impress on him that he didn’t have to be scared; that his daddy went on. Thinking of him feeling scared because of my removal twisted parts inside me.
And Jen … she was a decade out of the deep waters.
Please God, don’t let those tides turn.
Not being with them didn’t feel like mere separation. It felt like having a part torn out of me. Ripped off, then hidden.
I know full well that my pain is not a unique one. We have felt that pain since the dawn of our species. Each of us hands the capacity for it to the next generation, like some loathsome, precious baton, and yet to each of us, as we experience it, it is the most acute and personal ache there is. It is real like nothing else is real.
‘However,’ the angel said, ‘as a mercy and a gift, you may be shown someone you love.’
I stopped walking.
‘Really?’
‘A caution, David.’ His hand went up as he stopped a few paces in front of me. ‘You cannot speak to them. You cannot reach them. You cannot teach them or touch them or be touched by them. You are in every way apart from them and they from you, and there is no interaction until reunion, should it come. But you may be permitted to see them. We call it a viewing. And you can see them three times that way.’
‘Three times. How does that work?’
‘Three points in time in their life. Viewing from heaven to Earth, from us to them, you may see them for a period. Then you may see them later in their life for another such period. And then again, and then that will be all.’
‘Do I have to …? Do I get to …?’ I struggled to formulate my question. ‘I mean, do I have to specify a period, like an occasion? Or are they arbitrary points? Or do you choose?’
‘Our time is not their time. The two progressions of time do not run contiguously. Today, for us, we can look in on King David as he covets Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop, and today, for us, your son is nine years old, as you last saw him, and today, for us, the abomination of desecration reigns in vomitus blood, moments before the Return.’
“Life is capable of love, a generating force that is beautiful in ways you might spend millennia contemplating and still not fully appreciate. It matters. It matters more than anything else matters.”
The angel regarded me.
I regarded the angel.
‘That was a lot,’ I said.
‘A lot of abstract words to unleash on a forty-year-old?’ He smiled. ‘You have questions.’
‘Yes. I do,’ I said, and we resumed walking as I tried to formulate them.
‘I guess … some of my questions relate to free will and determinism on Earth, and how much you all know here and sort of control here. Can you see it all from start to finish? But, mostly, I want to know about seeing my boy, my Chris.’
‘To your first question,’ the angel responded, ‘the Alpha and the Omega did not merely devise a great and complex machine in creating His universe. He also created life. And life is capable of love, a generating force that is beautiful in ways you might spend millennia contemplating and still not fully appreciate. It matters. It matters more than anything else matters.
‘But love must have free will, or it is not love. In the absence of choice, the closest alternative in your experience might be a programme. That which is programmed to love renders the idea of love meaningless. But that which chooses to love validates the beginning and the end and all the in-between suffering. It is hard, but it is right. So there must be freedom. Otherwise there is no love. And no point.’
‘But of course, all that implies the freedom not to love,’ I ventured.
The angel nodded in a way that signified a very heavy burden. Perhaps the entire burden of history.
‘Freedom not to love, yes.’ His voice softened. ‘Freedom to hate. Freedom to rebel. Freedom to hurt, doom, curse, break, demean, mock, betray …’
‘And even hog the mustard at dinner. Okay.’
‘Yes, David. Mustard hogging is a big problem in your world.’
‘You know, despite your appearance, you seem to have the dim outline of a sense of humour.’
‘Your kindness overwhelms me, David. Free will. We do know what happens. We intervene when called upon in prayer, or sometimes when the evil is simply too great to be borne and His creation must undo itself should we fail to stave off ruin. And we have seen the Story – the story of love and choice; we have witnessed it play out from beginning to end. Yes, we know its ending. Understand, though, that that is not the same thing as directing it, though there is some direction.’
‘I’ll need time to digest that.’
‘The time is yours to take. Now, your son, if that is your choice.’
‘Yes, it is. I want to see his life. Please understand, I don’t mean that I don’t love my wife; she means the world to me …’
‘David, your heart is known. In time, you will learn to speak without self-justification.’
‘Oh. Okay. That’s also going to take getting used to. But, yes, the time is mine to take, huh? Okay, yes, I want to see Chris. Can I do that now? Or is there some process?’”
Extracted from The Man Who Never Was by Douglas Kruger, out now.
