... for just a brief moment ...

"Nana ... when someone dies, what age are they in Heaven? How old is your mom there?"

We were at the cemetery this morning and youngest granddaughter B was cleaning my mom's headstone when she asked this question. In the dappled sunlight sparkling through the trees, her sister J trimmed the flowers we'd brought, poured the contents of the little flower food packet into the container of water and set the bouquet of colorful flowers inside.

"Well, B ... she's not any age. Age only applies to our physical selves because these bodies are born and they die. We're physically very temporary, so we count the years to measure the bit of time that we spend in a body.

Our divine selves aren't physical, though, so they have no age. In our true divine spirit, we are eternal, so there are no years to count."

J, being the older sister who knows these types of things, added that we don't have any gender in Heaven, either, because that's part of the physical body, too. No color differences, of course, since you have to have a physical body to have any color.

Age, gender, color, weight, nationality, job, bank account ... None of that matters, none of that lasts. Without our bodies, who are we truly in our deepest, purest, truest self?

We finished our clean-up, then knelt under the old tree that shelters Mom's plot and thoughtfully said our prayers, as the ocean breeze lifted our words to the skies.