Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what
they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have
tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
[Children] outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.
Here’s my question: What age are you when you’re in Heaven?
I mean, if it’s Heaven, you should be at your beauty-queen best, and I doubt
that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothless and bald.
It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself,
do you walk around all gross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your
mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternity minus the leg that got
blown up in a mine?
I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the
application form that asks you if you want a star view or a cloud view, if you
like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you’d like to be seen as by
everyone else. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I
grow boobs by then, and even if I’m a pruny centegenarian by the time I die, in
Heaven I’d be young and pretty.
Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an
adult, I’ve decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
I realise.. that we never have children, we receive
them.
by Jodi Picoult
