By Star Zahra
The closest I ever felt to heaven as a child was wandering through the shrubs for hours, chasing butterflies, grasshoppers and the shy touch-me-not flowers. Those flowers fascinated me most. They were probably my first window into questions about nature and its ways. How could such a small, delicate plant react to my touch? I would press a finger against it, watch it fold, and wait for it to open again. Once, I plucked a flower to see if it would still respond. It didn’t. That was when I first understood that there was something tragic about life.
I was raised in a deeply religious home so I knew, long before I turned five, that there was heaven and there was hell. But children don’t think much about those places. They know only earth, which is concrete. They can touch it in the soil and hear it in birds. So I also didn’t think much about heaven or hell, until the day I stumbled on something that unsettled me.
I was chasing butterflies when I found a small brown dog lying still on the sand. At first it looked only asleep but the air carried a sharp, strong smell. As I stepped closer, a man passing by warned me off.
“Don’t go near it. It is dead.”
I ran all the way home. The next day, on my way to school, I passed that same spot. The smell was worse. Flies danced over the body, some crawling into its ears. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen—how helpless it was, just lying there like rubbish.
That evening, I told my siblings. My mother, alarmed, ordered me never to go near it again.
“It will explode on you!” she warned. Very typical of a Nigerian mother.
But I went back. Again and again, I returned to watch it change from flies, to maggots, to dried flesh and bone. Each time I stood there,curious and only seven, I whispered to myself, hoping: that somehow, it would go to God.
Lately, as a woman in my mid-twenties, whenever the subject of death and the afterlife comes up, I think of that God and of the many other animals, insects, and bugs that are killed every day. Where do they go? Why are we, as humans, so arrogant as to think they have no life after death? Are we worried heaven will be too crowded? Is there heaven at all?
