I'll never stop imagining the place where my daughter exists

The summer after my daughter died, I was fixated on seeing rainbows. Every time we had an early evening storm, I’d grab my camera and rush my husband out the door to chase the darkest, thickest clouds. He drove while I stared at the sky and told him where to turn and slow down.

It had to be timed exactly right. You can’t see a rainbow in the middle of the storm. You have to wait until just after the rain stops and the clouds begin to part. When the sun is coming out again, breaking through the dissipating moisture, angling in from the east, that’s when you might see it — the gleaming spectrum of color. Mostly, I was unsuccessful. I witnessed glorious displays of lightning and wind, but saw almost no rainbows.

To this day, driving towards a dark, stormy horizon at dusk conjures up some of the heavy, desperate confusion I felt right after Ana died. Where was she? How could she be gone? Why was I still alive when my child no longer existed? That’s also when I started to imagine what the afterlife might look like. I chased rainbows because I became convinced that they were proof of Ana’s existence.

I wanted answers from the rainbows that I knew I wasn’t going to get. I wasn’t about to get them from Ana either.

Did I think that she was somewhere behind the storm clouds in a place far above the earth, looking down at us like the girl from The Lovely Bones? Maybe.

In the first year or two after she died, I imagined that Ana was learning the ropes, getting good at making rainbows, figuring out how to assign hummingbirds to my yard, and occasionally dropping coins and feathers in my path. Maybe she was learning how to hear me. Maybe she was learning how to show me she was still here.

As a non-religious and not particularly scientific person, it’s been difficult for me to imagine what an afterlife might look like. All I have is my vivid imagination. I picture a place. There’s solid ground beneath Ana’s feet and an indigo sky above her head. I imagine that she has a body there, but only when she wants one.

It’s Ana’s place, as real to her as my yard is to me. And it looks like all the places that Ana always loved — the beach, the river, the wooded trails behind her school, her bedroom decked out with fairy lights and scented candles. It is a place of warmth and color.

Ana loved the beach. We live three hours away from the ocean, so she’d only been to a real white-sand, shell-strewn beach a few times in her life.

She painted a beach scene in her final year, using pearly iridescent acrylics to represent a luminous sky and pink sand. There was a girl in that painting, small and delicate, standing with her back to the world, staring at the ocean. I often think of this as Ana’s entry point into eternity, the place where she woke up. It was from that beach, the sand warm but not too hot for her bare feet, that Ana discovered she was the one who’d moved onto something wonderful. It’s the rest of us that got left behind.

Ana’s birthday falls on May 16th. The birds are nesting in earnest by then, the trees and flowers are blooming, the lawn is impossibly green. This is also what I imagine it must be like in the place where Ana’s soul exists.

Ana’s world is not just pink sandy beaches and miles of serene ocean. It’s also the deep green of early spring. It’s an old-growth forest filled with salamanders and tulip trees. It’s a purposeful place where she’s learning things that my living mind can’t grasp.

She’s been there long enough that she can send me signs at will. She’s greeting the souls of dead children and exploring the limitless expanse of the cosmos without the constraints of a body or time. Sometimes she’s watching those of us that got left behind and dropping a hint or two that she’s still here, that she’s ok.

I like to imagine that my love still reaches her there. I think it does. Signs of Ana show up when I feel lost or when I’m content or for no reason at all. I almost never dream about her anymore, though. That’s yet another loss.

My birthday is in May too. I’ll be 55 at the end of the same month that Ana would’ve been 25. We would’ve celebrated together by planting flowers, taking a walk by the Hudson River, eating cheesecake, and exchanging gifts. I would’ve given her a necklace, I think. Maybe we would’ve taken a weekend trip to some place with a lovely sandy beach.

Maybe we would’ve taken a walk on my favorite trail and looked for frogs and mushrooms together. Maybe we would’ve gotten caught in a storm and run through the trees towards the trailhead, laughing, just in time to see a rainbow arc out over the Hudson.

I’m still a little obsessed with seeing rainbows. I don’t chase storms anymore, but I do go outside after an early evening rain and stare at the eastern sky, looking for those familiar bright colors. Like the full moon, hummingbirds, and the brief few weeks that my magnolia tree blooms, rainbows feel like a miracle.

By now, I’m sure that Ana has mastered whatever magic is needed to produce such a monumental sign. It’s been nearly a decade, after all. She is on her beach, with four cats beside her: Kasha, Echo, Basil, and Luna. She was never alone in eternity, but now she has a real tribe. She is patient, because she’s not constrained by time the way I am.

She doesn’t feel it at all. At least, that’s what I like to believe. Because if time exists where Ana is, then it’s possible she’ll get impatient. She might not wait for me.

I like to imagine that when I die, I’ll wake up on the shores of Ana’s beach right after a storm. The sun will be setting and a rainbow will be stretched across the ocean, a bright ribbon of color sparkling like a dream. But it won’t be the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. No, that will be Ana, waiting with a smile on her face, eager to tell me everything she’s learned. And beside her, the cats, completely unfazed by my sudden appearance.

This doesn’t feel like wishful thinking. It feels like a prophecy.