Heaven

I never believed in heaven more strongly than I did when I was two years old. My paternal grandfather died and I told anybody who would listen that I was going to get the tallest ladder I could find so I could climb up to heaven and get Poppy Sam back.

I have no memory of this, but I was told this story many times while growing up. I don't know where my early concept of heaven came from, but it sounds like a physical, not spiritual, place. I learned much later that the afterlife, especially heaven, is not part of the Jewish belief system.

Had my Jewish-American family become so secularized in the mid-1960s that it was easier to tell a small child that his grandfather was in heaven — something no one in the family believed in — than to explain death in any other way?