On the way to synagogue one day my dad told me about Hell
And Heaven, or at least what he believes of it.
The story went a little something like this:

We don’t know anything for certain.
I won’t guarantee you an afterlife
When I’m gone. But the only after
Life I’ve ever heard are people talking
About you, remembering you.

If someone thinks of you and the times
Where you hurt them, they’ll place you
In Hell, in this immobile ash of sin.

Heaven is the kindness you give someone
That lasts forever. That is afterlife, no,
That is immortality.

I didn’t tell him that on that same strip of road
My mother and I also talked about an afterlife.
When she talked about legacy, she said:

If people remember your father,
They will know he was a good man.

If.

My father is soft-spoken and godly,
Although he’d hate both those characterizations.
I mean that I think that people will put him
In Heaven when the time comes.
I know that I will.

And that will be all I have,
Because despite all the scriptures and Talmud
He reads, he too doesn’t believe
In hauntings. He’s promised me that
Any psychic or medium who claims
To have a message from him will be a liar.
He can’t tell me that they’re all liars, Just like he can’t say whether Heaven and Hell
Are real, or just metaphors like he likes to say.

But he won’t say anything after he’s gone,
He doesn’t believe in mediums now and refuses
To let me get wrapped up in the foolish nonsense
That my mother and grandmother adore.
Anyone who speaks for him is a fraud

That’s for certain.

Abbie Langmead (she/they) is a Sapphic Jewish writer originally from Boston, MA, currently living in Dublin, Ireland. Their poetry has recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Northern New England Review, Trace Fossils Review, and many others. Find them in those places, wandering, or hosting dinner parties in her too crowded apartment.