As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

Morning light shimmers on the apricot horizon as I stand at the place where my baby boy rests.

how serene this baby was. They had known, too, without knowing, that something wasn’t right.

how fast things can

change. You think you have a view of what’s waiting for you just up the road, but then something happens, and you find out pretty quick you were looking at the wrong road.

that’s how the virus travels—in the breath and spittle of the one who has it—but he is taking no chances. He wears a mask and keeps the connecting door from the kitchen to the funeral parlor locked so that none of us can accidentally expose ourselves.

There is a professor from Harvard and doctors from New York who are working together to see if they can figure out

how to create a vaccine, but the paper didn’t say how far along they are.

And there aren’t enough nurses because half of them have the flu, too.

says everything is being closed. All the schools. The churches. The theaters. Parks. Any place where a crowd would gather.

“Too many of our doctors are away on the front. They’ve got first-year medical students and old washouts like me doctoring the sick!”

They’ve closed the base theater, the YMCA, the Hostess House. No visitors are allowed in and no soldiers are allowed out on leave. Even

Civilian workers took it home from the army base with them.

with that look mothers have that just says no.

I want to be where something good and right is happening, even if it’s just me and Mama taking soup to a sick person lying in a bed.

We didn’t know the war would get worse. We didn’t know a plague was coming that would change forever the way my children think of life and death. But you can’t get back the day you make a decision that changes everything.

there are no harmless coughs anymore.

Anyone who breathes is a potential carrier.

sat there thinking that if God could split an entire sea in half so a million Hebrews could walk across dry land, couldn’t he stop a little germ?

desserts. I have no appetite for any of it. What I hunger for is the way our life was before.

It does seem too much to hope for that an effective vaccine could be ready so quickly when Louis Pasteur, for example, spent nearly a year working on the rabies vaccine. But who of us in that waiting room wants to look hope in the eye and challenge it to prove itself worthy of trust? I can see that Papa does not wish to challenge it. He wants to embrace it, frail and untested as it might be. His gaze tells me he wants me to embrace it as well.

That was what it was like going back to school. You found out who is still alive after the flu and who isn’t.

Home isn’t a place where everything stays the same; it’s a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same.

We were all wounded inside where no one could see. None of us had survived the last year unscathed.

You want to fix what hurts the moment it starts hurting, but this time you’re going to have to embrace the slowness of healing. You’ll never be able to live with this part of your story until you realize you must make peace with what happened to you and your part in it. And that takes time.”