This is a rough week, every year. Tomorrow is the last day we had our sweet angel speak to us, hug us, laugh with us, on Earth. We held him for eight more days, but tomorrow, three years ago, was the last day his soul was truly a part of this Earth.

I’ve learned, I know, that his soul is still very much alive and has never left me. But I still miss that laugh, and I miss those hugs, and I miss that boy more than anything on this Earth.

And remembering that week of waiting, wondering, fighting, pulls at my heart with a pain at one time I didn’t think I’d survive. But I have. For three whole years, I have survived.

I took my angel on Earth to church with me this past Sunday. His daddy was working, and I felt I really needed the sense of peace that church often provides me to start off this challenging week. This new church is not typical in any traditional sense.

It is not located in a grand building with a steeple or adorned with stained glass windows. There are no pews or figures of Christ or really an altar. It’s a small collection of like-minded people who congregate in an office-like space in a strip mall next to a book store across from a car wash.

And this past Sunday, while my sweet son ate yogurt-covered raisins and laughed appropriately at jokes he didn’t understand, the pastor spoke of Heaven. And I dreamed of my angel up there and what he might be doing and how I’ve often thought over the last three years, how it would be so much easier to be there, up in Heaven with him, than it is being here, facing this lonely, difficult world of grief without him.

But then the pastor described this world, and the world that is Heaven, and how everything that we do, and everything that we experience, is all a matter of perception. How each one of us sitting there would tell a different tale of what happened there, and what message we took for today’s sermon, based on our perception. And how Heaven, as a concept, is also based on perception.

And I again, thought of my angel in Heaven. And how I perceive his Heaven. How I imagine him bouncing on clouds, and sliding down rainbows, and having picnics with my grandmothers. And if I can perceive Heaven to be that perfect, then why can’t my Earth be that perfect as well?

If I wake up every day imagining my world to be as beautiful and wonderful as my baby’s world in Heaven, then maybe it just might be so. Because isn’t it true that it’s all what we make it?