A Story I Didn't Write

I'm so busy these days that I rarely have time to read or write. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. But once in a while something comes into my heart that I cannot push aside until it has been written down. This is where most of my poetry comes from. Yesterday, as I was driving in my car trying to ponder on a lesson I was preparing for Relief Society, I got distracted thinking about some other things going on in my life. Good things. This story planted itself and I knew I needed to put it on paper. It's rather silly, but it is important to me, today. And maybe someday when I'm going through one of parenting's ubiquitous struggles, this will be a reminder I need to hear.

A Story I Didn't Write

It’s difficult to describe to anyone currently walking a telestial world what my life was like. Incivility, cruelty, depression, these were foreign concepts. I was constantly surrounded by my family. I suppose we were a family much like any other, if somewhat larger than you’re used to. We were a symphony of a million different instruments, each with its own character and sound. The cacophony was beautiful and each tone harmonized. Some were loud and some were soft. Some were staccato and others melted into the music like velvety chocolate. But our world wasn’t like yours. The music we made was never angry. Somehow, it always worked.

Perhaps it was our common goal. In a telestial world people are pushing a million different directions because they think they want a million different things. It’s as if every single instrument is playing a different melody and there really isn’t any musical quality to it at all. But in my world, we all wanted the same thing, and so our symphony, though diverse, rang up to heaven with a oneness that sang of cooperation, of family, of hope, of joy.

What you need to understand is that oneness is not sameness. I think most people have felt that the loneliest of places is often surrounded by people.  We yearn for connection and understanding, to find someone who laughs, weeps, and ignites when we do. In that sense, it really doesn’t matter how good and kind everyone around us is, to be kindred is something entirely different. And so my world was not so different from yours. Although everyone in my family sang the same tune as me, and I loved every single one of them for their own unique sparkle, I still found myself in a constant search for the ones whose hearts beat the same cadence as mine.

I found them.

Perhaps they found me. Maybe we were drawn together like drops of water on the same flower petal. Maybe we had always been together, pieces of a whole whose connection reached back farther than memory. Perhaps there was no finding involved, just a recognition from one soul to another. Whatever the case, if my home could be called heaven, it wasn’t because it was flawlessly beautiful, devoid of want and fear, or even peopled with those who honestly seek to help and serve everyone around them. It was because of my friends.

I don’t know how long our connection lasted. It must have been forever in a place where time was meaningless. We learned together, grew together, laughed together. They stretched my intellect and challenged all my capacities. They knew how to make me smile and could sense when I was afraid. Every step of progress we made was a team effort. We climbed on each other’s backs in a human pyramid to make it from one level to the next, and then those on top would reach down, lifting each dear friend until we all landed on a higher plane of understanding and existence.

No one was excluded from this group; it didn’t work like that in my world. There weren’t cliques or any sort of stratification of people. We just each found those around us who seemed to be pieces of the same whole, and while we loved everyone, not every cog fit together as perfectly as I did with my friends.

When the announcement that we had all been waiting for finally came, my friends and I added our voices to the deafening shouts of joy. We were finally ready. We’d reached the point in our eternal progression where we simply could go no further in the world we inhabited. We would fall to the telestial world. That might sound like a step backward from your perspective, but we knew it for what it was: a chance to become something more, something better. To someone observing a caterpillar, the quiet, dark solitude of a cocoon has to seem like a step backward from the warm sunlight, but the caterpillar builds his own prison, knowing he will emerge from it something much better than what he was when he entered.

Despite being constantly in the company of love and encouragement, the wait for our turn to fall seemed interminable. We discussed every possible trial and imagined what it would be like when we finally passed through the veil. In all this discussion, serious and full of levity, we never once worried about being apart. It didn’t matter that we would be potentially spread across an endless world, each drowning in a sea of people struggling to find their way. We didn’t know how or when we had found each other before, but we were certain that we could do it again. It would be a natural process, and we would learn it in a similar manner as we would breathing or walking. We had discussed every single possible trial in our eternity together, but never that. The concept was too foreign, too unthinkable, like being told you will wake up tomorrow and have forgotten how to blink.

Just when I had told myself, for the hundredth time, to stop listening for my call, it finally came. The voice spoke softly that it was time to go, igniting flutters of nerves and fires of anticipation uncomfortably inside my soul. Immediately I turned to my friends and shouted, “It’s time for us to go!”

But the voice came again, softly but firmly, “Not them, just yet. I’m sending you first.”

My heart fell, gripped by terror at a thought I’d never considered. Of course we would go together. We needed each other. How could we pass the test to come without the guidance, advice and encouragement we had always shared between us.

“No!” I shouted, choking back tears, “I just can’t do it alone. I’ll wander the Earth searching for them.”

The voice stayed silent and I felt his calm as he breathed out comfort and strength.

Then without warning, I started to fade. My mind went groggy and quiet.

But in desperation I tried one more time. I thought, “You taught us that we're interconnected. I’ve never been on my own.”

As all went black, I heard one more thought, “They’re coming, my daughter, but you must go first. You will be their mother."

What if the reason we feel instantly connected to a new child isn't because of biology, but because we recognize a soul we already knew and loved.