Circles of Heaven
I titled this piece just before sending it off to a contest for a local art magazine. This piece didn’t win, but it ended up being featured in one of the issues. I’ve been thinking about the title I gave it impulsively, and realizing how very much it fits the piece and me as an artist, despite the fact that I no longer consider myself an active, believing Mormon and that I no longer believe in anything like “Mormon heaven,” which I always understood was a kind of hierarchy of three kingdoms (Telestial, Terrestrial, Celestial) where you are sorted by God after death depending on how righteous you were in this life.
The idea behind the sealing of families in Mormon temples to be “eternally bound” is fraught for me, and yet, I also like the way in which my circles are tied to the circles adjacent to them, and those to other circles, so that they all form a cohesive whole. Yet you can look at any set of the circles and see, ah, here are the greens, here are the purples. Some people are drawn to one side of the afghan and some people are drawn to other sides, depending on which color they find the most interesting or arresting.
I much prefer the idea of a heaven in which we are loosely joined to each other because of our likeness and also our difference than the idea of a heaven where we are forced to be with people we may or may not like to spend time with because they are genetically related to us. I had a difficult relationship with my father, who was abusive physically and emotionally, and I have been severed from my ex-husband by divorce. My children are no longer members of the Mormon church, and my stillborn daughter Mercy is not clearly sealed to us in any way, since she died at birth and never had a formal blessing nor is she on the records of the church.
While I was working on this project, I kept realizing that it wasn’t finished, and I would go out to buy more yarn. I had to keep in my head the colors that I’d used already, and then stand in front of the choices at the fancy yarn store I found in the midst of the pandemic and the divorce (another friend gave me a gift card to this place). And I instinctively found myself drawn to this color or that one. And then I added some more that I bought on Amazon. No, they’re not all the same fiber blend. Some are acrylic. Others are cotton or wool blend. I put them together because of how I wanted the final piece to look. I started with a central group of eight and then went from there.
I admit that even after the piece was finished and I’d put it up on the wall, I wasn’t sure I liked it. I kept thinking I was going to take it apart and put the outer circles in a placement that left less negative, open space. But then when I got to my new house, I realized I loved it just as it was. Somehow, it expressed something I meant it to express in that way, the closeness of the original circle, and the way it spread out as it moved past that section. I even like how much effort it takes to put it up, far more than a simple square or rectangle. It doesn’t sit on the wall easily. It seems to want to fly off.
After my youngest daughter Mercy was stillborn, my whole world came undone. I found I didn’t like the idea of a God who had planned for her to die to teach me some “lesson.” I spent years terrified that if I didn’t learn that lesson that God would take another one of my children from me. I had insomnia for years, and each night, found myself wandering the house, checking in my kids’ rooms to see if they were still breathing. Each time a child left the house, I kept imagining the different ways they might die, if God decided that I wasn’t a good enough mother and my punishment would be to live with the punishment of another child dying. Getting hit by a car. Disease. Cancer. Heart defect. Or just—disappearing, never to be seen again. I cursed my imagination, which allowed me to see my other children dying, but never Mercy alive. I wanted to see her, to speak with some version of her, but I never did.
Until just recently I had an experience where Mercy came to visit me. She wasn’t in any human form, more of a simple spark. She tried to explain to me what it was like where she was. She kept saying, it’s not like that, or we don’t think in those kinds of opposites, or it’s hard to explain when you think of things in terms of life and death or body and spirit. She told me that she thinks of me as her mother since I sacrificed to bring her into “presence,” but she doesn’t think of us as divided or herself as “dead.” She is where she is, and she isn’t angry about being there. She doesn’t feel like she has lost out on anything by being “dead,” as I think of her.
It was a profound experience which I am still processing, but I think it has something to do with this afghan and the circles it shows. She isn’t one of the close circles. But she is still connected to me. Her life and mine are intertwined. Her colors are different from mine, perhaps the green on the edge. I’m more yellow in the center. But we can speak across those differences, and we are both in some kind of heaven, even if it isn’t much like the Mormon heaven I thought of before she changed everything
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