From the opening chapter of Irish Twins:I have a little God in me. It’s a power I use to keep watch over my children, who are still on earth. I played many roles during my eighty years of human life, but the one role I couldn’t shake in spite of passing on, was the role of mother to my five children.
We say once we’re mothers we’re always in mother mode—even when our kids are grown and gone and having kids of their own. Now I know it’s true even when we’re dead. And from my vantage point of three hundred and sixty-degree Light, I see all. I see my five children as babies, as adolescents, teens, college students, newlyweds, young adults, and parents.
I didn’t share much about myself with my children when I was still alive, although I gave them everything. I gave them hot breakfasts and bagged lunches. I gave them corn beef and cabbage, boiled potatoes and chicken on the spit. I gave them clean laundry pressed to perfection and thin ankles. I demonstrated what it meant to be a dutiful wife and I taught them faith by example. I gave them all full heads of curly hair, which I inherited from my own mother.
Unfortunately, none of my children knew my mother. She died before they were born.
For everything I gave them, they gave so much more in return. They kept me young. And seeing the world through their eyes gave me the higher education I didn't have as a young woman. I didn’t go to college because during the Great Depression all luxuries came to a grinding halt. Higher education was definitely a luxury—especially for girls. I vowed it wouldn’t be the same for my children.
My children had all the benefits of the baby boom generation, including the finest educations we could afford on my husband’s blue-collar salary. They attended Catholic school. And today, as I watch from my vantage point in a place we don’t call “Heaven,” but rather, “Ohr,” which is Hebrew for the word “light,” I see that only one of my five children still attends church on a regular basis. But she’s no longer a Catholic. Jenny, my fourth child and one of my Irish twins, is an Episcopalian. The rest of them are just busy.
It really doesn’t matter, however. In Ohr, there’s no such thing as organized religion. Here we do not recognize our differences, because we are all alike.
We are all in the image of God.
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