My niece Helen was quite young when one of her family’s beloved cats died. When her mother, my sister Laura, tried to explain what had happened, Helen became very thoughtful and said, “he must be licking butter off Jesus’ table.”

What a heart-squeezingly beautiful image this comment conjures up. More recently, someone suggested to me that we will see our pets in heaven, and I say, why not? I feel obliged to point out here that I am a slightly confused agnostic, lest anyone take me too literally; but I feel a great comfort at the idea of my family’s long succession of rag-tag, hard-luck-story pets bounding up to the gates to meet me, with shiny coats and calm clear eyes.

When my children were young, they provided me with a handy excuse to watch animated movies. Disney’s Mulan came out in the early nineties; when the kids and I would get home from school and daycare respectively, I would invariably say, “Let’s watch Mulan!” and they would gladly agree. This went on for many weeks until we (meaning me) found a new favorite.

I mention my love of children’s movies here because one that I especially loved was All Dogs Go to Heaven. The main character, Charlie, and his sidekick Itchy, were sketchy characters at best, but they redeemed themselves in time to qualify for wings and halos. Even the mob boss, Mr. Carface, got ushered in through the pearly gates whether he liked it or not.

Of course, this line of thought can lead me into a logic-inspired quagmire. If dogs get in, then cats have to come too. And what about all the hamsters and gerbils, and those lizards I got one year? Some people have spiders as pets. I do not want to see any tarantulas in heaven.

My father came up with a wonderful path out of this quandary. As he approached the end of his life, he expressed hope that he could meet up with my mother in the afterlife and wondered how this might be accomplished. He suggested that heaven might be an infinite realm of non-corporeal spirits that has risen above such mundanities as time and space, and that individual spirits gravitate towards other spirits that they know and love. Thus, we each build our own heaven, and not even the sky can set a limit.