It seemed Wheeler’s cancer caught everyone off guard, but Wheeler had long contemplated his mortality. Twelve years prior to his death, in his memoir he wrote, “I do not know what lies beyond the grave, if anything. So I have invented my own eternity. In my blue heaven, only love is eternal. Love carries us into the life to come, beyond the beyond. When we love someone, we vest that person with eternity. We fashion our heaven out of our earthly life, and populate it with the ones we have loved. The person who has loved only himself will have only a bare room. But I am among the fortunate, for I have loved deeply and well, and all my beloved ones will be with me, family and friends, the women I have loved, the writers I have esteemed, the pets who came to live with me. My heaven will be full and not at all lonely. And maybe, because I have been loved, I’ll be in other heavens too.”