Every Purpose Under Heaven

As most of you already know, I’m doing the final edit for my second novel, Every Purpose Under Heaven. It deals with a dying man who is afraid to move on. Now it is done, I can say it’s been a long personal journey for me. It’s made me confront myself and what I do or don’t believe about life and death.

The dying man, whom I call Bill del Vecchio, is based in part on what happened when my husband, Chuck, died. We were giving Chuck morphine on an as-needed basis so he was in and out of consciousness. When he was out, he seemed to be talking to people we could not see. We asked him about it once when he woke. He told us that he was in the Civil War trying to get supplies out to troops dug in along a road. He remembered moving his arms protectively because he was running from tree to tree to dodge bullets. He described the scene so vividly it made me think of the battlefield at Manassas. When he went back to sleep, his arm movements started again, so we assumed he had gone back to that dangerous place.

I was reminded about Chuck’s experience by the media reports surrounding Pope John Paul’s death in 2005. The officials around him reported that the pontiff said, “You have come for me. I thank you,” shortly before he died. No explanation was offered about whom he was talking to. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he was talking to the saints and his predecessors, the people he would have expected and wanted to see. Since he was in a coma, as I understand it, he was never asked.

If I was right, and the dying pontiff saw whom he wished to, I have to ask myself why Chuck wanted to be on a Civil War battlefield during the height of a battle. Why ever would he have wanted or expected to go to such a place? Not having any answer made me curious about what happens at the time of death.

I had no time to answer my own questions at first. After his death. I went out on another quest to find my father. He had been killed in a Halifax bomber during 1944. It took me time and travel to three continents to find his family and the survivor of his crew. The result was my first book, Extraordinary Things, based loosely on my own experience and heavily on that of the WWII aircrew veterans I met along the way. Once that book was done. I turned back to trying to understand what might have happened to Chuck.

Since the closest we ever get to the experience of death comes from those people with near-death experiences, most of the literature and research deals with them. Their reports are fairly consistent. They report a tunnel and light and seeing dead loved ones. That was a comforting thought, but it still didn’t explain what Chuck saw. Then I started reading books about things like soul purpose and incarnations. Most of them argued that we are all part of a spiritual universe that seeks perfection. Well, no one I knew was likely to be perfect anytime soon, but I began to see what the books were getting at. I asked some further questions. What if Chuck were being shown something to help him learn what he was meant to? If so, it couldn’t just be him. What if all of us go through this process to learn something from having lived our lives? I found that idea intriguing. But do we all have to go through this? Some of us may be self-aware enough to see our lives as leading to some purpose. On the other hand, what if someone were not self-aware, or even more, was deliberately un-self-aware. What then? I began to see the kernel of an idea for a story. What if a modern man started "remembering" something from the past? Could what he discovers say something about life and death that would be hopeful and ultimately even joyful.

Immediately, I ran into a problem. I needed to find a historical time similar to ours yet separated enough to provide a perspective on ours. After some false starts, I settled on the Italian Renaisssance, a time when fundamentalism clashed with reason. I thought of a scholar named Aonio Paleario. No one much has heard of him now, but in his time he was as famous as Erasmus or Bruno. He was brilliant, scholarly, stubborn, and arrogant, and very modern in his independence and demand for freedom. He deliberately martyred himself to oppose the Catholic Church and when they predictably executed him, he left behind a trail of broken family members who were punished along with him. If such a man were to “come back” in modern times, would he have learned something? Would he try to do things differently? What if some of the same people “came back” with him--would he try to make amends to them? Or they to him? That’s what Every Purpose Under Heaven tries to explore.

I have to admit I’m attracted to the ideas of symmetry and accountability, so I like the idea that our untidy lives are not the end. I particularly like the idea of purpose and that maybe surviving and amassing material goods is not the ultimate reason for existence. That leaves open, of course, what the purpose is. Some years ago, I remember reading reports about a Neolithic cave burial. The skeleton was of a deformed man who had grown into adulthood. The remains of shriveled flower garlands were found, suggesting that he had been mourned. That was an epiphany for me. With all the bad press our supposedly “brutish” ancestors had been given through our media, here was evidence that they cared for one another, had compassion, and regardless of what the anthropologists care to tell us, were human beings. Surely our purpose all these thousands of years later cannot be much different—to love and have compassion for those around us—those, if you choose to believe—who have agreed to come back with us and link their lives with ours.

I do not know if any of this is true. But, after writing the book, I hope so.