i have appreciated people's posts in here thus far--including your honest and thoughtful post Boomer (all of which i too read) but also Straight's above and the whole question of what happens after death.
i've never been able to believe in something like heaven and hell--it just seems absurd for humans to try to use our limited and myopic experiences here on earth to try to conceptualize and/or visualize something that would have to be so beyond our comprehension and experience...and intuition just seems to reinforce this belief for me as i get older. i'm not saying we don't sense or feel what happens to those we love after, i just can't buy that we could picture it or understand it.
as i mentioned a month or two ago, we lost my mother to COVID this past October--she was 77 and i will be 50 in April. i've lost a lot of people over the years, friends and family (both of my parents and an awesome stepfather are gone, and so are all of my grandparents), and none of those deaths have hit me like my mother's did this last October. i too have experienced similar things to what Boomer calls "coincidences" (for lack of a better term) over the years that have made me feel that these people are with me in very real ways...
...but NOTHING up to this point has told me that "this can not be it" more than my mother's death. in a very intuitive and/or instinctual (spiritual?) way, as i continue to handle all of the things there are to handle after losing a parent at this later stage in life, and going through all of the things that tie me and my sister and my aunt to her, and going through photos, and all of the other material manifestations of how much we shared, experienced, and went through together, i have never felt so really and essentially that my near 50 years with her could possibly "be it." i hope that makes sense.
all of that being said, i wouldn't even begin to think that i could visualize or understand how all of this works beyond the world we share...and who knows, maybe this is some weird blurred stage of grief i'm experiencing...but instinctually, that just does not seem to explain how i've felt the past few months.
sorry if this strays pretty far from the talk of "hell." some thought-provoking posts in this thread...