Jesus in the Grass

Dad died in October. I may have mentioned this. My four year old took the news pretty well, and I first thought it was just a failure on my part in explaining death to her. I feel like she does understand that PawPaw isn't coming back but I don't think it's any of my explaining that did the trick. If anything, I'm sure I just made it all the more complicated by dancing around it and salting it with Christian lore and culturally acceptable pap. But she had no qualms with it, just a detail to remember when planning dinner: Mommy will be there, and Daddy, and my sister, and Grandmom, and aunt Joo-Loo, but not PawPaw, he died.
It's probably because I'm not sure myself what happens when our ticket is punched and I don't really want to count anything out. Heaven sounds great...but I can't stand the thought of going to church now, so I'm not sure I'd want to hang out in the Gardens with what I assume would be church-going folk. Hell sounds bad, for sure. But, I'm not really afraid of it. I'm not a Saint, and I don't think I deserve the corner office in the Kingdom, but Hell? Come on.
I wrestle with what to tell my daughter because I feel like what I tell her about my beliefs, or lack thereof, will have greater implications in the future. I want her to believe her own thing and not to find out I was so wrong about all of it. Which is counter-intuitive considering I have no trouble writing her notes from the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny, or making a mess in her room and telling her the Skull Lilly Pirates did it. She'll find out soon enough, as her sister did, why it seemed strange that all those characters had the same handwriting, despite the writer's best efforts to disguise it. And the heart of it all may be something I just realized while writing this. Would I ever write them a note from God? No.
But, sometimes I'm cornered into a question. The other morning on the way to daycare my daughter says to me, "Is PawPaw still in the grass?" Which, I suppose is a little nicer than her usual declaratory "PawPaw's in the dirt."
"Yes, baby, he's still there."
"Is Jesus in the grass?" the unforeseen natural progression.
"Yes, baby," I said, looking at her in the rear view mirror.
"Is the dirt Heaven?"
Well. and then I said, "Well." I could rattle off all day the worth of incisors and molars at the Star Bazaar, or how Rance Red saved Tin Rood Sulley from a cat during one of his pirate adventures, but I was stuttering on the bit about Heaven and God and the afterlife.
"Honey, PawPaw is in Heaven with Jesus, and that's all...above us. It's just Dad's body in the dirt, that stays here. But his soul is up in Heaven and your soul is what makes you you."
"Oh. Ok," she relinquished.
That seemed to have put to rest any more questions she had about the subject for a while. Then, yesterday, "I don't want to die because when you die your body breaks apart and it will hurt." These non sequitors of hers are going to keep me hopping for quite  while, I'm sure.