More On The Afterlife

Anna is still busy trying to sort out exactly what happens when things die.

One of my standard lines about this is that people usually die when they are either very. very old or very, very sick. And since neither she nor anyone else in her family nor any of her friends fit this description right now she shouldn't spend time worrying about it.

This had been working for a few months, but then last week she started asking for concrete data:
"Well, how old and how sick do you have to be to go to heaven?"
"Is heaven up in the sky? Do you get there in a tube?"

I told her that dying happens to everyone but no one knows exactly when.
I told her that since no one we have met has ever been to heaven and come back with photos, we don't know exactly what it is like and can make up our own idea of where the person we love would be happiest.
[From what I can gather, Anna has decided that her heaven is somewhere in the vicinity of Churchill Downs.]
I have no idea where she got the tube thing from.
She wrapped up this conversation by asking me if heaven is where the dinosaurs went. And do they eat people?

A few days later, we were listening to her Disney Classic Children's Songs CD. One of her favorite songs for a while now has been "When the Saints Go Marching In".
When the song was done, she asked me what a saint is. I told her something along the lines of "someone who does very good things while they are alive and goes to heaven after they die".

She thought about this. Then, with her best 'Da Vinci Code' look she told me:
"Mommy! The saints go marching in! So heaven must be on the ground!"