In addition to my own brothers and sisters, four in all, I grew up with three cousins, daughters of my father's brother, who lived close by, across the pasture about a hundred yards or so away. The older two were about my age—Jean a little older, Susan a little younger—and were almost like extra sisters. I think I still remember all of our birthdays. Today is Jean's.

When I think of Jean, I think of three things: golden hair, green eyes, and sickness. Even when we were very small—I mean four or five years old—I was vaguely aware that there was something pleasant about looking at her, even when we were fighting. Retrieving memories now, I see that she was really a beautiful child.

I was also aware that there was something wrong with her body. She had violent and frequent coughing fits and her breathing was sometimes oddly loud and heavy. And I knew that she sometimes went to the hospital, and that there were things she couldn't do, and that sometimes the family's activities were limited by some concern for her health. She was always thin and frail-looking, although surprisingly strong and energetic. For some years—until she was eleven or twelve, I think—her mother taught her at home while the rest of us went off to school. But I just accepted all this, as children do, without giving it a lot of thought, as being the way things were. It was perhaps easier to do that because she was always so full of vitality and good spirits; any weakness that got in the way of her playing with the rest of us was just a sort of natural obstacle, like the briars and the cow manure that interfered with our pasture baseball games, that we all worked around. Her mother, I can see now, was understandably riddled with anxiety, but managed to give her the freedom to be as much of an ordinary child as possible.

I was somewhere well into my teens before I knew the name of her disease: cystic fibrosis. In those days children diagnosed with it were not expected to live past adolescence. Jean lived long enough to graduate from college, marry, and have a daughter, making it about halfway through her 31st year. Her daughter has her eyes.

When I learned of Jean's death I had a very strong reaction of disbelief. I don't mean disbelief that her death had occurred, as I had long understood that she would die young. I mean disbelief that she had ceased to exist. Whatever had happened to her, and it certainly involved her removal from our world, I knew that there must be somewhere, somehow, on some plane of reality, a green and gold essence of Jean that still lived. And I could only imagine it freed from the sickness that had always hobbled her.

I find these days that I have an increasing confidence that heaven exists and less and less of a coherent and specific idea of what it might be like. Nothing that I can imagine can transcend the limits and defects of this present world; I mean that literally; where I begin to imagine such transcendence, my imagination begins to fail me. But I do find myself thinking of it, broadly, in somewhat Platonic terms. In some reality which we can never hope to enter by our own power, to which we can only be taken, is the real Jean, the one who always has existed and always will exist in the mind of God, the one who exists perfectly because God has thought of her that way and whatever is in the mind of God is real, eternally.

...it doth not yet appear what we shall be (1 John 3:2)