In Heaven the blessed enjoy perfect happiness. Above all, our happiness is union with God, but we also look forward to eternal union with family and friends. It is easy to imagine heaven undoing Earthly misfortune and reuniting us with lost love ones. Harder to understand is how God can restore to us the losses that are a necessary part of even the best life.
Children grow up so very fast. When they are young, your paternal concern is to teach them, to help them become more independent. One day you find that you have succeeded. Let us say that everything has gone well, that they have reached a virtuous and well-adjusted adolescence with good relationships with their parents. In fact, in some ways you are now closer to your children than before, because now you can now converse with them as adults, share your mind with them more fully, make them collaborators on adult projects. And yet, there was another kind of closeness that went with the extreme dependence and unselfconsciousness of childhood that is lost. Never again to come home from work to hear a little voice cry “Daddy!” and run to you and want to be picked up. No more needing you to sit by her bed when she’s scared of the dark. “She doesn’t need me anymore.” You say it to yourself first with relief–this is what you’ve been working for–and then you say it to yourself again, and it hits you…the loss. You would not have wanted them to stay children forever. They deserve to grow up, and seeing them grown brings other joys that you would not miss. If you could live forever, you wouldn’t want to go through an infinite number of children so that these years would never end; somehow, that would rob it all of its meaning. What do you want?
How can it be fully heaven when our children’s childhood is gone forever? I will borrow an idea from natural theology, when we speak of God’s “pure perfections”. In creatures like us, there are types of excellence that can’t coexist in the same subject–male and female, red and blue, innocence and experience, the grace of the house cat and the awesomeness of the mountain, whatever. Since all goods are fully present in God, we must imagine that every excellence that excludes other excellence is actually a mixture, some pure perfection combined with a limitation derived not from the perfection itself but from some finitude either in the definition of the excellence or in the nature of the subject. So too it may be with the happinesses of this life. What is truly good about the childhood years and what is truly good about the following years–the “pure joys”–perhaps do not contradict each other in themselves, but cannot coexist because of the limitations of this life. For example, it was not the helplessness and ignorance of our toddlers per se that gave these years their charm, but only that these occasioned a particular sort of openness in our young ones, and inspired in us a protectiveness that made us appreciate their value in a particularly visceral way. In heaven, the limitations that exclude coexistence of joys from different parts of life can be removed. The openness and intimacy of the childhood years can be restored to us, and also the transparent beauty of our children’s innocence restored to us, together with the other intimacy of the meeting of adult minds and the pleasure of seeing them grown to virtuous maturity.
Of course, we ourselves also were once children. Shall I not also recover something I lost in intimacy with my own parents, not because we had any kind of falling out, but simply because I grew up? I can regain that childhood closeness to them without becoming a child again, and thus I would not lose my adult type of closeness to them, nor the closeness to my wife and children that has always presupposed my adulthood. On Earth, these exist sequentially, but in heaven can coexist.
Our loved ones cannot be a distraction from the beatific vision in heaven (and vice versa). St. Augustine speculates that in heaven our representations shall be ordered so that we shall “see” God active in all things, as automatically as we now “see” life in animate things. Martin Buber writes of God as the “eternal Thou” who is co-present in communion with any “you”. Perhaps in our communion with our loved ones in that blessed place we shall intuit the divine pre-motion in each of their mental acts, so that their presence to us will always simultaneously be His. Perhaps this intuition will itself be what allows us to recover the intimacy of the different phases of life all at once.
The Orthosphere 
Maybe a little OT, but it’s what jumped into my mind:
Although I’m in my 60s I can remember some of the pure joys of childhood. What better feeling can there be than to wake up and suddenly realize it’s Saturday. No school!
When I was a small child I almost never had soccer practice, or piano practice, or cub scouts, or any of that soccer mom stuff. My parents generally let my sister and me explore things in books, in the house, in the back yard, in the front yard. Non-helicopter parents.
No need to work to support a family. No need to deal with an angry wife or co-worker. No need to fill out that stupid online form or make those stupid reservations or research that stupid appliance that needs replacement.
No. Just the pure joy of discovering things. I remember it well. It is not gone.
Thanks, Bonald. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I read this.
The thing I miss most of all about the toddler years is that back then I could make everything basically OK for my kids – despite the pain or bloodiness (or, to their innocent minds, the apparently permanent utter disaster) of their present moment (“I’m bleeding! I’ll bleed out! I’m going to die!) – by just taking them on my lap and telling them, with the aweful godlike paternal authority I then enjoyed, that they would be OK, nothing ultimately to worry about. And they would be comforted. They would buy it, totally. So, they would relax, and be comforted, and encouraged.
Fortunately, it was always true. Even with respect to the catastrophic brain bleed.
All I had to do was appear, immense, ancient, wild and mountainous, and they would relax, and be comforted.
I can’t do that anymore. Their adult difficulties are ineluctably theirs. I can’t do anything about the money, or the boyfriend, or the sick son. Except to just keep on being the serene, confident, mountainous paterfamilias.
I have lost my paternal power, formerly utterly dispositive. “You are safe,” I could then say, and they would totally believe it, because it was true, and because I believed it. So then they could get to sleep, despite their worries about the monster under the bed or at the bottom of the deep dark stairs. Duddy would protect them; that was enough.
That doesn’t work for them these days, despite their fundamental trust in my judgements. Such is the matter of my grief. They know that my reassurances are true in the long run, but that doesn’t help so much as once it did in the short run. I can’t just fix it for them, whatever it is that bedevils them. That hurts.
Fortunately, the grandchildren think of me as animated by some ancient eldritch power to discern, predict, and wizard – aye, and dictate, dispositively. This is a superpower even their own father does not yet possess.
So, the hero’s journey of the pater does not ever seem quite to end, until his death. Even then, given some jot of true heroism therein, it could live on, to comfort generations yet unkindled, even as entirely ignorant of the wilderness adventures of their great grandfather.
Which is pretty cool, really. It means that those wilderness adventures might not when all is said and done have been only private, or therefore relatively ineffectual as causes.
Men do not want Father’s Day cards, or observances. Not proper men, anyway; not proper fathers (I saw this just this afternoon, in a poll of the fathers on my management team, who all instantly and totally rejected any notion of a public corporate notice of appreciation for their paternal labors – “That’s an invented holiday, that happened for the benefit only of the ilk of Hallmark cards …”). They want, rather, the future that is worth living for their heirs. This is why God promised what he did to Abraham.
Men are for the future; are for their progeny, for their house. That telos can be fully, completely – and, so, finally, and permanently – realized only in heaven.
When I went through this, I called it “the incredible shrinking Dad.” When I see a young father basking in this glory, I silently pray that he knows it is as real as young love, but also as ephemeral.
That loss, of being able to make things okay, is still in the future for me. My children aren’t adults yet, but they’re big enough that I can sense how quickly the last years between now and then will go.
Shortly after her death, I dreamed about my mother. We were both adults, walking along a road together when she picked me up and held me as if I were a baby. I asked her how she was doing it and she said, “You don’t understand. I’m in heaven now and in heaven we are very strong.”
Thank you for this. You brought me to healing tears.
What a beautiful dream! Very close to the intuition I was trying to express.