I had a two-hour massage in Coronado, in what was definitely not a luxury spa. There was jackhammering somewhere in the building, which is not exactly the soundtrack you expect while someone is trying to convince your nervous system to relax. So every time the noise started, I thought about Zee.
I thought: Zee loves me. If you are new to my writing, Zee (aka Xena the Puppy Princess) was my soul dog who left this earth way too soon for me. Wherever she is, whatever “wherever” even means, she would know me. And if there is an “other side”, she would want to see me first. I was her favorite person.
Then I started thinking about everyone else I would want to see. Sean. My mother. My uncles. Kevin. My grandparents. Jane. My dad. My sister. Depending, of course, on who gets there before me.
And then the thought changed. What exactly would they know? What part of me is eternal? Would they remember the details of me, or would they remember something else? Would they recognize the part of my soul they knew here? Would they feel the love I had for them? Is love the thing that crosses over when everything else falls away?
Because so much of what defines us here seems temporary. Jobs. Houses. Money. Arguments. Roles. The stupid things we worry about. Even our bodies. But love feels different.
A dog doesn’t love your résumé. She doesn’t love your accomplishments. She loves your smell, your voice, your presence, the way she feels when you walk into a room. Maybe that is closer to the soul than anything else. Maybe recognition on the other side isn’t, “Oh, there she is.” Maybe it’s simply: I know you.
That question had been following me around Coronado in other ways too. Lying by the water with my eyes closed, I kept thinking about being young in Hopeland, stretched out in the driveway trying to get tan, listening to music and worrying about whatever teenage problems seemed enormous at the time. I remember reading magazines about things like Princess Diana marrying Prince Charles, events happening somewhere out in the world while almost my entire life was still ahead of me.
More than forty years later, I could close my eyes beside another body of water and somehow still feel like the same person. My body had changed. My life had changed. People had come and gone. So much had happened that the girl in the driveway couldn’t possibly have imagined. And yet, behind my closed eyes, I was still me.
Maybe that’s part of what I mean when I wonder about the soul. Not that we remain unchanged, because obviously we don’t. But there seems to be something underneath all those versions of us that feels continuous. The same person looking out from behind different eyes.
And then I thought about the things I regret. Not catastrophic things. Human things. Times when I made choices because they made my life easier, even though I knew they might make someone else’s harder. Times when I understood that something was wrong but somehow managed not to feel as badly about it as I think I should have. That bothers me now.
Do we have to resolve those things before we leave our bodies? Do we have to really understand what we did? If I made a decision that affected someone else’s life, do I someday have to experience what it felt like from their side?
There are so many theories about what happens when we die. I’ve heard people talk about a life review. Not necessarily punishment. More like understanding. Maybe you finally see everything without the protection of your own point of view. You see what you intended, and you see what actually happened. You feel the ripple. That idea scares me a little, but it also makes sense.
Maybe the point isn’t to leave this life with some impossible clean ledger. None of us could do that. Maybe the point is that while we’re here, we are supposed to become willing to look. To admit where we were selfish. To stop rewriting our own history just because the truth is uncomfortable. To repair something when it can still be repaired. And when it can’t, maybe the only thing left is to let the knowledge change us.
I don’t know what happens after this. I don’t know if Zee is somewhere waiting for me, if my mother knows I still think about her, if Kevin exists somewhere beyond the version of him I have carried all these years, or whether anyone who loved me can feel that I still love them.
But if anything about us is eternal, I hope it is love. And maybe truth. Maybe those are the things we don’t get to leave behind.
Later, rereading Corinthians, I stopped at a verse I’ve known forever: These things remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love. My dad actually read that passage at my wedding.
The King James Version uses charity instead of love. The original Greek word is agápē—not simply romantic love, but something closer to self-giving love, the kind expressed in how we treat one another.
I had spent two hours on a massage table wondering what part of us might survive everything else.
And there it was: love remains.
Perhaps what is eternal is not the self as we understand it here. So much of the self is circumstance, memory, body, history. What intrigues me is your sense of the same “I” looking out through all those changing versions. We cannot quite locate it, yet we experience its continuity. And perhaps love feels eternal for a similar reason: it can survive the disappearance of almost everything through which it once expressed itself. The person can be gone, the voice gone, the touch impossible... and still the love remains an event in the present tense.