One Guy's Viewpoint

Dead People Are Dead

Betty DePaul was good looking. There was no question about that. Friendly too, and she was happy to have us barely-teenaged boys around. And we were all too happy to visit her.

Sadly, and I don't remember all that well, but Betty must have had some illness or injury that kept her from moving about much. My memories are all about her sitting at the piano or in, I believe, a chaise on the front porch. But it wasn't exactly a porch. Closed in, as it was, foyer might be a better word. But could she tell stories. She would keep Jim and me enthralled listening to her tell about younger days as a dancer/chorus girl in New York. She wove a terminally ill Damon Runyon into these and probably included other celebrities as well.

Jim lived next door to me and was not quite a year younger. Betty and her husband Henry lived right across the street in an upper front apartment in an old building containing quite a few units. Henry sold cars. The location we lived was the near corner of Ash and Railroad in Casper, Wyoming. The time was 1948, nearly sixty years ago. She looked French, very light skin and black hair, but I have no idea what her maiden name was. Henry's name was French but he looked Italian. He would have fit well in the cast of The Sopranos.

They weren't in the neighborhood very long, and after they moved, I never saw them again. Once I did read in the local paper where Henry had been arrested for whopping a member of his foresome across the head with an iron during a round of golf. But that was it. I never heard any more of them.

Of all the stories Betty told us, I remember very little. But one thing she said stuck with me from then on. It made sense, and was something I accepted even during periods I attended churches that believed otherwise.

Dead people are dead, she said, no, not alive in some form in either heaven or hell. She didn't use any scriptures, of which there are many I've since learned, to back this up. At the time I didn't know anything about the Bible anyway. Instead she used God's fairness. Why would a fair God condemn anyone to years and years more in a burning hell than a person, equally sinful, but one who just happened to be born much later. Similar was her point about heaven. No, dead people were just dead and the hope of afterlife was resurrection from that state. As I said, this made sense to me then, and, I believe, was the starting point for the understanding of God, Christ, and the Bible that I have today.

Earlier I mentioned that numerous scriptures support this. Here are a couple. Just last night I was reading in Daniel 12:1-2, "... at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt." Jesus said, "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." (John 3:13)

If someone were to ask me to name "the Resurrection chapter," I could say right off, First Corinthians 15. But what if I asked what "the Going to Heaven chapter" was. I don't think I'd get an answer to that one.

posted by Burt @ 8:55 AM