Living in Afterlife

 As narrated by the Mother:

“When I was young, my mother was a lover of children, not just her own, but everyone’s.

Other mothers in our community would bring their little ones to her door. They knew she would cook for them, tend to them, scold them when needed, and love them as fiercely as if they had sprung from her own womb. And I? I walked tall. I was proud to be mothered by such a woman.

But pride, like peace, can shatter in a single night.

I remember one evening when a woman came rushing to our home, clutching her limp, lifeless infant. Her eyes were wild, not with grief, but with accusation. She pointed a trembling finger at my mother. “You poisoned my child!”

Then, without another word, she abandoned the baby with us and vanished into the dark.

My mother panicked.

She gathered the child in her arms, woke my younger brother and me, and hurried through the night to her elder brother—a renowned herbalist, a man whose hands knew secrets the living had forgotten.

My uncle took the baby. He said nothing. He simply performed his incantations, then slowly drew his palm down the child’s spine.

And to my astonishment, to my witness, the baby gasped. Then cried. Then lived.

My uncle had raised the dead.

We returned that child to her mother before dawn. What a relief. What a miracle.

That was then.

Now, that same mother has converted to one of the foreign religions. She no longer speaks of that night with wonder. Instead, she wonders aloud: “Where is your uncle now? Is he in Heaven… or Hell?”

I sat with that question for a long time. And then I began to wonder myself, not about the afterlife of a good man, but about the obsession with it.

Why are we so fixated on where the dead go, when we barely know how the living live?

Her brother walked the earth healing children. He asked for no temple, no pulpit, no foreign creed. He simply used what the earth gave him to pull a soul back from the void. And yet, because he did not pray to the right God or follow the right book, she now fears for his eternity.