Last week when Paul Wellstone?s plane crashed in Northern Minnesota, I was safely ensconced at a table in Champps with my friend Todd.

The news quickly and swiftly swept through Champps and the stunned silence of the usually raucous Friday afternoon lunch crowd was deafening. I looked across the table at my friend and said, ?I?m sorry but this is really the last place I want to be right now.?

He understood, all I wanted to do was get back to the office and a phone so I could call Sister #2 and see how she was doing. But we had just gotten our food.

Out of the blue, Todd looked me right in the eye and asked, ?Are you afraid of dying.?

?No,? I said quickly. ?I used to be when I was a lot younger. But then I?ve lost a lot of people in my life, people who never had a chance to be 30. I had to deal with death at a very young age. When I was about 3 or 4, my babysitter died of cancer. She was 17 and she was my cousin. My mom had me go to the funeral because she didn?t have to deal with death until she was a teenager and it totally freaked her out. She thought if we were exposed to death at a young age, we would handle it better. Of course she changed her mind after I went to kindergarten and started drawing pictures of coffins and young women in yellow dresses?that?s what my cousin Colleen wore when she was buried.?

?What do you think happens when you die??

The questions threw me off balance. I don?t think anyone had ever asked me such questions so blankly. I don?t think everyone has ever even cared about what I thought about life after death.

At first I was uncomfortable. I?m not the type of person who gets asked a lot of questions. I have a hard time talking about myself (but absolutely no problem at all writing about myself). Usually I?m the person who rifles off about 204 questions in five minutes and then follows those up with 3985 more questions. I?ve been told on more than one occasion that talking to me is a little bit like being interviewed. I can?t seem to help it. I do it before I even realize it. And I?m not doing it to make conversation. I do it because I am curious and want to know.

So you can see why Todd?s questions took me by surprise.

?Well,? I started, chewing thoughtfully on a fry. ?I think when you die you go to a heaven or hell of your own making. I also believe you end up where you think you deserve to be. If you think you should be in hell, then you create your own hell and that?s where you spend eternity.

?If you believe that you should go to heaven, then that?s where you end up. To me, heaven is an endless series of your happiest moments in life. All of them, you just relive them one after another when you are in heaven. Every single happy thing you get to do all over again, and then you instantly move on to the next wonderfully happy thing. Then, when you run through all the happy things once, you just start over again. So it?s just an eternity of all your happiness.?

When I finished I held my breath waiting for his reaction. Like I said, I don?t usually talk about such things for fear of being judged ignorant or uninformed. But he didn?t do that, he just looked back at me and said, ?You?ve got a good heart.?

And then I had to blink back tears because it was one of the nicest things someone had said to me in a long time.