Giving up Heaven

If today the mountains crumbled
And fell into the sea
And the breath of life God gave
Was taken back from me

If all the world was ending
And there was nothing I could do
Do you know that my last thoughts
Would certainly be of you

And don't you know if time would stop
It would not be a pain to me
If my last vision upon this earth
Was your face that I would see

For in your eyes I saw
A world that was so at peace
And that thought would be on my heart
If today all things would cease

If today's the day I meet
The only God above
I'll be certain to speak of you
And how I fell in love.


My husband, Dan, wrote me that poem while we were dating in high school. It was almost 20 years ago now. No wonder I fell in love with him, right? I found it when I was cleaning out our things, framed it, and put it on our wall. I look at it every day. I say OUR things because after falling in love in high school, and getting married when we were nineteen and twenty, everything was OURS. Very little was just mine or just his. I liked it that way. Sharing our life. Sharing our stuff. Sometimes when we would disagree then we would start claiming things.

An example:

When I was pregnant with Baby Girl, I was placed on very strict bed rest. I was not allowed to go upstairs to our bedroom. So rather than bring our bed down the tiny stairs of our 100 year old house, Dan's brother let us borrow a spare bed he had, and they put it in our living room. This bed was far superior to the bed we owned. It was insanely comfortable. Luckily for us after the bed rest was over and Baby Girl was born, Dan's brother said we could just keep the bed. So they had to haul beds up and down those stairs anyway.  Thus it came to be that if we were lying in bed at night and I was teasing Dan (or he was teasing me,) he would jokingly reply with,

"That's it! Get out of MY bed," and I would say,

"No, you get out of MY bed! Your brother gave it to ME. It's mine!" and then Dan would say,

"We wouldn't even have this bed if it weren't for MY brother, so it's mine. You get out!"

Around and around we would go, until we were laughing too hard to continue, or kissing. Either one was good. That was the extent of our fighting. We never fought, ever. Of course we disagreed on things, but we didn't fight about them, we discussed them. We never yelled at each other. We never called each other names. We never brought up past wrongs. It just wasn't our way.

I had a friend tell me shortly after Dan died that she believed Dan would give up heaven to be able to stay here with me and Baby Girl. I know she's right. Dan had a passion for God, and always said how great Heaven was going to be when we got there. He was excited to go, although of course we all thought he would be much older when he did. Dan couldn't wait to meet Jesus and ask Him questions about theology. (I wonder if after a year and a half he's asked them all yet.) Still, I know he loved us so much that he would gladly have given it all up to be able to stay with us.

See this? This is when grief is so bad it physically hurts. Right here, right now my heart is aching for Dan.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle