The Vision Read Online Free PDF

washing and dressing the body done today aren’t much different than a century ago. Except instead of laying out your dead grandma on the dining room table, it’s done here, at the mortuary.
    Religion came up first over Number Three, Mary Margaret Hanley, Catholic, a rosary wrapped around her folded hands. Mr. Ludwig was wrestling with her dress collar and the two-sided tape, but my eyes kept wandering back to those beads wound through her stiff fingers.
    â€œHow bad do you have to be to go to hell?” I’d asked him.
    â€œYou have to commit a mortal sin,” he said.
    â€œLike …?”
    Mr. Ludwig waved blindly for the scissors, answering as I handed them over. “Killing someone. Or stealing. Or committing adultery.”
    I frowned. “Stealing and murder are hardly the same. You really go to hell for stealing? Forever?”
    â€œWell.” Mr. Ludwig glanced up at me. “The outcome may be different, but not necessarily the intent . Catholics believe a sin is something done deliberately and with full understanding that it’s wrong. That could apply equally to each crime.”
    â€œBut everyone’s stolen something ,” I said. “Snuck into a movie, done dine-and-dash, taken candy on a dare. The Catholics can’t really believe all those people are going to hell. Who would ever get to heaven?”
    â€œEveryone who goes to confession,” he said. “That absolves them of sin.”
    â€œEven the really bad ones? Like killing someone?”
    He smiled at my disbelief. “As long as they are sincere in their repentance, yes.”
    â€œThat’s like the mother of all Get Out of Jail Free cards!” I was amazed. “Why would anyone not sin?”
    Mr. Ludwig stopped working, resting his hands just short of Mary Margaret on the table, and looked at me. “Would you kill someone if you could get away with it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSteal?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe?” I thought about the time Tasha and I were in eighth grade and each stole a pair of socks from the mall. Mine were argyle—black, green, and white. Really cute. I’d never worn them. I don’t think Tasha had either. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I would, actually. I’d feel too guilty.”
    â€œExactly. If you had ever stolen”—he raised an eyebrow like he knew what I’d been thinking—“you’d probably still feel bad about it. That’s repentance. You can’t fake it. You actually have to feel it in your heart, and Catholics believe God knows the difference.”
    That conversation rolled around in my head the rest of the day, collecting mass like a downhill snowball. People who died with an unconfessed mortal sin were damned to hell, Mr. Ludwig said. If that were true, and I knew they were going to die, I had to tell them, regardless of whether they ended up living or not. I couldn’t let them burn for eternity just because they hadn’t gotten to say they were sorry. I rushed home, madly searching online, elated that the answer was so simple all this time.
    It wasn’t.
    Of course.
    Confession and mortal sins and hell were what the Catholics believed. The Muslims, on the other hand, thought the Catholics were going to hell because they weren’t Muslim. And the Buddhists didn’t believe in hell at all.
    Back to square one.
    But it was the start of our own ritual—Mr. Ludwig’s and mine—discussions about religious beliefs interspersed with draining fluids or wiring a jaw so it wouldn’t hang open like a broken mailbox.
    â€œCarmen, Betty, thank you so much for coming,” I heard from the other side of the chapel door. A family member. I perked up, leaning closer, my hand against the wall for balance.
    â€œOh, Joshua, I’m so sorry about your father. We’d just seen him at the symposium. He looked so healthy … happy