Article May 6, 2019 Issue

Will I see you again?

Melissa Hayden

That question frequently came to thought for several months after my husband passed on. Amidst the busyness of dealing with estate issues and the yearning I felt for peace, the question was both tantalizing and unsettling. I was deeply comforted by the weekly Bible Lessons found in the Christian Science Quarterly, which constantly fed me with pure, spiritual ideas—ideas that encouraged me to feel God’s ever-present care and tender husbanding. My conviction that life is eternal, untouched by disease or death, was certainly growing, but so was a sometimes not-so-subtle curiosity about whether my path and my husband’s would cross again after my own passing.

Although Mary Baker Eddy uses the word hereafter several times in her published writings to refer to a time after the transition called death, the teachings of Christian Science are clear that death is, in fact, an unreality, as Christ Jesus proved. He raised others from death before his own resurrection, bringing to light his message of eternal life, and his followers continued to share that message after Jesus’ ascension. The Apostle Paul declared, “The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

A familiar question and answer from Mrs. Eddy’s Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 were what had prompted me to consider what might lie ahead. The passage begins, “After the change called death takes place, do we meet those gone before?—or does life continue in thought only as in a dream?” The answer states, in part, “When we shall have passed the ordeal called death, or destroyed this last enemy, and shall have come upon the same plane of conscious existence with those gone before, then we shall be able to communicate with and to recognize them” (p. 42).