R/Nosleep (Get Spooked)

People In My Family Don't Just "Die"--We Go To A Better Place!

By u/beardify

"People don't just die," I remember yelling at Carmen in third grade. "They go to a better place."

"Nuh-uh!" Carmen sneered. "When people get old, they die. D-I-E. Then they get put in the ground and you never ever see them again."

I covered my eyes and ran away crying. Thinking about grandma under the dirt with the dark and worms...it was just too horrible! Momma had said: "grandma is in a better place now" and momma wouldn't lie...would she?

When my mother explained that I wouldn't be seeing my grandmother again, she gave me a chain bracelet with a tiny key on it, a steel one in the shape of some weird animal pawprint. I held it to my chest like a talisman until I got control of my breathing and the tears stopped.

As my friends and I got older, death crept into our childhoods. We learned the meaning of words like hospitals, hospice, nursing homes, funeral homes, visitations, and cemeteries–and a lot of us learned the hard way. It was after the candlelight vigil of a slain high school classmate that I finally got the nerve to ask:

"Mom," I asked, "where is grandma buried?"

"What kind of talk is that?" Mom scolded. "You know that your grandmother's not in some nasty graveyard. She's just moved on." I rolled my eyes, but I didn't push it.

The thing was, this 'better place' was a constant theme in our lives. My mother was a doctor, even though she disliked medicine and found patients twice as irritating. When I asked her about her career, though, she just smiled and shook her head:

"If you work hard for your family, you'll be rewarded when you get to a better place."

It was the same story she used to soothe me when I was bullied or failed at something important to me.

"Just think about how temporary and unimportant this stuff is," she'd say, squeezing my shoulder. "When all is said and done, you're going to spend eternity somewhere else."

Yeah yeah, I thought bitterly. In "a better place."

When I was in college, my best friend Hunter's father died unexpectedly. A heart attack, even though the man was barely sixty. It tore Hunter up inside, having to juggle the funeral arrangements, the inheritance paperwork, and his own struggle to graduate.

But it did give me the push I needed to finally talk to my mom about the future. I confronted her after Thanksgiving dinner that year.

"Look," I sighed, "we need to have a plan for if the worst should happen." She looked at me with a blank stare. I groaned. "I'm not a child anymore! I know that one day, you're going to...move on...and it helps to have some things prepared. A grave plot, embalming or cremation options, a will–"

"You won't need any of those things!" My mother waved her hand. "Everything this family owns already has your name on it, and when I get old, well, it'll just be my time to go to a–"

"Mom!" I shouted, losing my temper. "I'm talking about something real, not some imaginary better place!"

"But honey," my mother whispered gravely. "There is a better place. You're old enough now...I suppose it's time for me to show it to you." I stared dumbfounded as my mother stood up (slowly; age was making her stiff) and used a paw-shaped key like mine to unlock the wall safe beside her desk. The key emblem matched the lock perfectly–how had I never noticed it before? That symbol must've been mom's failsafe, in case she "moved on" before she'd had a chance to tell me the truth.

Mom showed me maps of a huge patch of land about an hour outside of town. It was in the middle of nowhere, and at first it looked like nothing but forest–until I saw a tiny structure in the middle of all those trees.