If the others are going to hell, then I am going along with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I, too, and this awakens my deepest wonder. Søren Kierkegaard

“On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples . . . On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever.” Isaiah 25:6-8

In the dream I am sitting at a long wooden table, which stretches into a black infinity. Not a terrifying blackness; a warm, electric darkness that speaks of saturation and richness. I am sitting in an oil painting, but with colors more real and more familiar. The props remind me of the 18th and 19th centuries: wooden bowls full of artfully arranged fruit, rustic loaves of bread scattered in the middle. I am sitting on a bench at the longest table of my life, quietly and with my hands folded in my lap. Around me people eat and laugh and talk with each other—people I both know and do not know, people I recognize and yet have never met. They are throwing a party to which I somehow snagged an invitation. I squint at their faces—men, women, and children, and suddenly I know where I have seen them. I have seen these faces on CNN. Dark brown skin, black hair, lines of worry worn into the creases around their eyes. These friends, all around me, are Rohingya refugees who fled their country and got on a boat, desperate to escape those who wanted them eradicated. I watch them, joy radiating from their faces, and I then I pick up a piece of bread to eat alongside. I hear an audible voice, so loud it wakes me. This is what heaven is like. I hear a voice full of timbre, both inside and outside my experience. In heaven, you will feast with those who have suffered the most on earth.

I wake with a heavy blanket of peace around me, for the first time in months. I luxuriate in that feeling, willing it to never leave. But it only lasts a few minutes, before my anxious brain intrudes. I think: finally, I’m not scared to die. I think: I don’t know if I believe in hell. I think: God just made me a heretic, and now I don’t know what to do.

// That boat full of Rohingya refugees, I remember reading, was not allowed to land anywhere—a ship of the doomed. I read about it in the feverish pitch of the hospital room where I was close to dying. Kept alive by machines and medicines, I caught snippets of the world outside of my bed with blurry eyes. My body had decided to fail. My tiny new baby needed me to get better faster than I was able.

At night, when I was the most alone, I thought about those people in the boat—the slow beeping of the monitors checking my blood pressure, my husband asleep in a chair, our baby in a plastic hospital crib. I could not reach my baby. Other people had to take care of the son I had fought so hard to bring into the world. I did not let myself feel sad about this. Instead, I thought about people who were suffering more. I thought about the boat people, the Rohingya. I saw their faces in my mind.

I had made it; my baby had been born. They had got me on the medicines before my heart burst. We were lucky, I told myself fiercely. The Christian language of my youth drifted up to the top of my mind. We were a miracle.

But were we? We had survived while little children starved to death on a boat that drifted from one closed country to another; the world watched silently as we all agreed there were some people too desperate to help. I turned over the faces of the people on the boat like rocks in my fingers. I wanted to make them smooth with my worry. I wanted to save them with my anguish. I, who had barely escaped death, wanted to save everyone else myself. I didn’t trust God to do it anymore.

• 

// I read a friend’s book recently. It has been on the New York Times bestselling list for weeks. It is about how she got cancer and almost died. It is gorgeous, both sad and hilarious, true and clean. It is the kind of book everyone needs and everyone devours. It is a book that talks about life and death at the same time.

I loved the book, but I had to put it down. This woman is a person of faith, and when she was close to death—when the veil was thin, as we like to say—she experienced God’s presence. A peace which passed understanding, a tangible sign that she was loved. When she got better—though her health is still in a constant flux, she is more terminal than the rest of us—that sense of peace faded away. She now has to live in a world where she is alive, but dying, but not dying to the point where God is with her.

I read that book, which offered comfort to so many who had suffered or watched the people they loved suffer. Instead of feeling comfort, I felt the same prickle of loneliness I had felt in my own hospital days, awake while the rest of the world was sleeping, keeping vigil for my own heart, longing myself to live, terrified of going to the place I had been taught to love. I didn’t feel God’s presence when I was near death. I felt forsaken. I felt like God had given me too many things to love, and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go.

My dad, a pastor for over 35 years, recently took on a part-time job as a hospital chaplain, to make ends meet. Over the years he has performed countless weddings and quite a few funerals. But he has never before driven from one corner of the city to the next, visiting the dying, those who are lower-income and on the state insurance, which now requires a visit from the chaplain once they enter hospice.

Sometimes when my dad is feeling tired, he will tell me a little bit about what it is like to be surrounded by those not long for this earth. My dad tells me that people die in such a variety of ways. He says the ones who hold on longest are those who can’t forgive.

// I am alive. My two children are alive. They are now six and two years old. I am in an elementary school cafeteria that smells of boiled vegetables. There are no windows, and the linoleum is swept clean, the picnic style-tables pushed next to each other to create long rows. I am going over English language worksheets with fellow mothers in our community. Our neighborhood is home to many recently-arrived refugees and a strong immigrant population. My toddler and I are desperate for friends, and once a week I dust off my English teaching degree and my materials. I used to want to be a missionary, to convert Muslim refugees to my religion, to save them from hell. Now I simply make coffee in a corner of the cafeteria. I make cookies with lots of ginger and molasses, sharp with flavor. I print off worksheets, full of phrases I hope might make their lives the tiniest bit easier. My neighbors come to my community English class, shy at first, then smiling broadly. They touch my son’s face. They stroke his hair. They take pictures and send them to distant family members.

My son clings to my legs as I go over the worksheets. I am assessing the language abilities of these new-to-me women as we go. Can they read in English? Can they understand basic questions? Most can. I settle in with three women, all wearing headscarves at a corner of a table. They breeze through my questions: they know the alphabet, can tell me their addresses (around the corner from my house). I ask them how long they have lived in my city, and what language they speak, and where they are from. The leader (there is always a leader) answers for everyone. She is older than the other two women. She wears lilac polyester pants, a flower-printed hijab, a shirt with sequins surrounding the sleeves, a hint of lipstick on her bright face. This woman tells me that they have all come to Portland in the past year, that they speak Rohingya, and are from Myanmar.

I ask her to repeat herself, and she says it again. You, you speak Rohingya? I ask, peering closer at her face. Yes, she says. Yes I speak Rohingya. I AM Rohingya. The other women sitting at the table beam at me and nod. Yes, they are Rohingya, too. I surprise them with the force of my enthusiasm. Rohingya! I nearly shriek. Here, in Portland! I ask them to tell me the story of how they made it over, but they can’t. They are the lucky ones, the ones who survived. Our shared language fails us, and the trails that brought them to this school cafeteria remain inscrutable, mysterious. They are simply here, at this moment, sitting with me. They drink the coffee I pour into styrofoam cups, too much sugar and powdered creamer for my taste, perfect for theirs. They eat the cookies I made and bring out a tin of biscuits to share. They try to make my son laugh, but he won’t. He whines at me until the oldest woman gives him a cookie, forever buying his shy and stubborn love.

We sit at a long table together in an easy silence, born of a desire to stretch that moment as long as possible. When the class is done, I push the stroller with my son in it, and the women walk back with me. I wave at them from my front stoop as they continue to their apartments. I will see them, nearly every day, walking to and from school together, gathering our children and taking them home. Every Friday we will feast together, in the house of joy known as one of the lowest-rated schools in the state. We will drink our coffee and eat our cookies. We will sit in the mystery of being alive, of what it means to be a miracle in a world of suffering, for that one hour every week.