At 5:41 a.m. on January 6, 2017 Bruce R. Babbitt floated out of this life and into the next. After looking down on his corpse for a while from near the ceiling, disgusted that he'd drooled all over his pillow case, he felt himself slip through the ceiling boards and enter an intense light.
There was simply no way to describe the light other than as pure love. Intense joy surrounded him, a light that permeated every molecule of his mind, a white so vibrant it should have incinerated him. He thought I should be ash. But he wasn't. He was sure of that. He still had his form. He studied his fingers, little sausages of light. All was light. All was knowledge. He wondered how there could be so much light and no glare. It was hard to explain, but the white was goodness. As he was verbalizing this, or rather thinking it, there was no difference, a man walked towards him from a great distance; on earth it would have been perhaps a block away. He was on the other side of an iron gate. There was a fence too, also iron. On the man's side of the fence was a garden. Even from that distance, Bruce could perceive the intense colors. Light flicked and flaked, darting this way and that way like water droplets in sunlight hitting a hot tin roof.
Oh the joy he felt. He wanted to sing. He did sing. And he could sing. That amazed him. Natasha, his wife, would be so proud. He wanted her to hear him. On earth he couldn't sing. Sitting near him at church must have been very hard on Natasha. He felt bad for her. All those years listening to a man who couldn't sing pour his soul out in song each Sunday. As he thought this, he was back in the chapel at his old ward house in Provo, Utah. He was sitting next to Natasha. She wore her elegant blue dress with white birds and white irises on it. The congregation was singing "If You Could Hei to Kolob," his favorite hymn, and he heard for the first time him singing through the ears of Natasha. They were on the third verse--
The works of God continue,
And worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression
Have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter;
There is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit;
There is no end to race.
--and his voice definitely was not pretty when he hit the high note on "spirit." He knew the song only intensified as it progressed, and he winced as he imagined what he would sound like in the fifth verse when he hit the high note on "being":
There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.
He felt himself as Natasha anticipating that moment; she wanted to slouch down on the bench, dreading the note's arrival.
As Bruce was experiencing this earthly moment, he felt a warm, fatherly embrace of his hand. He looked up and saw the man who had been at the iron gate. He realized it was Natasha's father, Wayne, who had died in August. Wayne laughed. "She needs to work on that."
"Work on what?"
"Not caring so much what others think. Embarrassment keeps her from fully experiencing love. Go ahead though. Follow this memory through."
As Bruce did this, he came to the moment where he actually tortured that note on "being," and he felt Natasha giggle inside. It was not a laugh of ridicule, but a chuckle of acceptance. This was the man she loved even if his singing made her want to crawl under the bench and hide. He also noticed others around her were giggling inside too. There was one little honest girl behind them, the Jones's girl, who was more blunt. The thought in her head was, "Oh somebody kill him now, please." That made Bruce laugh, and all of the sudden, it didn't matter whether he could sing back on earth or not.
He could sing now--really sing. But he didn't care about that either. What he cared about was the light and the love. He had no words to describe the joy he felt inside.
Perceiving his thought, Wayne said, "It feels good, doesn't it?"
"It does. Very good. But will Natasha be alright?"
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