Prompt: What can happen in a second.
“You don’t really believe in heaven,” Po said casually. A moment passed and she turned to face me, a shaggy fennel bulb dangling from one hand.
“Not exactly.” I felt her eyes on me but did not look up from my pile of chopped carrots.
“It seems like a pretty all-or-nothing proposition.” She broke the stalks from the bulb and began slicing it.
“It might depend on your vantage point.”
She looked over her shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised. How to explain this?
“For someone experiencing it, heaven is eternal.”
“Okay. And for the rest of us?”
“For us it could seem quite fleeting.”
Po screwed up one corner of her mouth, unsatisfied.
“Relativity.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“Do you remember that movie, the one where the astronauts go through a wormhole to try to find the lost scientist?”
“Sure.”
“And they realize that the planet the scientist is on is close to a black hole? Time travels much faster there. And it dawns on them, In the month he was gone, their colleague actually lived an entire lifetime.”
“And they’re like, oh shit, because every hour they spend there is like a decade back home.”
“Something like that. The point is, the astronauts are on the planet. They’re there for an hour. They’re there for a decade. Both of those things are true. It just depends on your vantage point.”
“Okay.”
“So in that last second, when the heart stops beating …”
“You think a dying person might experience that instant as an eternity?” Her face softened, as if she were coming around to the idea.
“Why not?”
“So an eternity in heaven and dust to dust …?”
“Utterly compatible concepts.”
“Hmm.” Po walked the big bowl of vegetables to the table, bumping me with her hip as she went. “You’re turn to make the dressing.”