We’ve all heard people say it: she’s dancing with the angels, or he’s back with the love of his life, or some such line when someone dies.

But is that reality? Is that what heaven would look like?

This is something that always troubled me. I’d have to restrain myself from asking, do you believe that?

When I was a young boy, my grandfather said the angels were bowling whenever there was thunder. It made perfect sense to me at five or six years old. Of course, the reality was different. But many of us still carry that concept of heaven. Perhaps the angels aren’t bowling, or maybe they are, but the part that troubled me is what it all would look like.

When I die, what would the people who went before me look like if this concept of heaven is correct (and, of course, the considerable assumption they’d let me in)?

If there is a pearly gate, a fence must connect it. Why would heaven need a fence? Who are they trying to keep out? And how long would an infinite fence be? The very question is a contradiction. An infinite-length fence has no definitive length.

But let’s leave that question aside and go to the heart of the matter. My grandfather died when I was 12 years old. I remember him as a kind, funny guy who appeared very old. He was sixty-five when he died, three years younger than I am today. If we were to meet in heaven, how would he recognize me? What would he look like to me? Would he be as I remembered him, or would he be the young man who married my grandmother, dancing away on the clouds?

Would my mother be the same as I remembered her when she died, or would she be the young woman I remember from growing up? Or would she be the young girl, the first-born for my maternal grandparents?

Is this all just stories we tell ourselves to make the loss of others more tolerable, or is there an element of truth in it?

Think about it for a moment. What would you want to be like in heaven after you die? Assuming you lived a normal life and made it to seventy or eighty years of age, what would you want to be like when you arrived in heaven?

If I were to say I wanted to be as I was at nineteen, then I would not be the person who became a father or grandfather. If I said I wanted to be as I was when I died, then many of the people from earlier times in my life wouldn’t know me.

Perhaps we tell ourselves these things because we fear the possibility that this is indeed “all there is.”

The mental image of grandparents, parents, friends, who have passed away enjoying eternity in heaven gives us comfort that we will see them again.

But it also gives us an excuse to waste those limited moments we have in life on what may turn out—I would say I am certain of it—to be a false hope.

We have memories to remember those who are no longer among us, and the memories we make with those still here are what we will leave behind. That is why life is precious and we need to live every moment.

And, if you think about it, what fun would it be bowling against perfect beings? Do they ever miss a pin?

I’ve never been much of a bowler and would think there’d be more creative endeavors to enjoy should there be a heaven, but embracing this life, these moments, the time we are here is a better way to slide into eternity.

And relive the memories occasionally. If you remember, they are never gone.