Healthy in Heaven

Bart: Um, ma'am, what if you're a really good person, but you're in a really, really bad fight and your leg gets gangrene, and it has to be amputated. Will it be waiting for you in heaven?
Teacher: For the last time, Bart, yes!

— The Simpsons, "The Telltale Head"

When a character dies and turns into spirit form, they'll usually turn into their ideal form. A character that died of old age will become young again, while a character that died of illness will often become healthy. Disabled characters might also become able-bodied, while characters who died of injury almost always never show sign of that as spirits. And they are whatever gender they considered themselves to be.

In exaggerated form, this might be the reason why a person becomes a Cute Ghost Girl (with the other option being they died as a child). They died as an adult but returned to a healthy, childhood form as a ghost.

Compare to Residual Self-Image and Throwing Off the Disability. Contrast with Jacob Marley Apparel.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Zig-zagged in Death Parade, due to humans essentially being Cosmic Playthings for the duration of their stay in the Afterlife Antechamber. Whether they are impacted by injuries and ailments or not seems to either be left up to the Powers That Be, or simply due to a Supernatural Fear Inducer.
  • The old man in Death Billiards was impeccably spry and agile, able to beat his much younger opponent in a game of pool despite having cataracts and holding up in a scuffle with him. The billiard balls were connected to random organs for each player, and the old man was unaffected by them while the young man felt every hit. This might be because the old man likely died of organ failure and that carried over into the afterlife.
  • The young man was stabbed by his girlfriend, but didn't see or feel the wound until much later.
  • Physical wounds seem to only appear after the guest remembers what caused them, but they impact each person differently.
  • When the black-haired woman finally regains her memories, her leg gives out from an injury she sustained, with her skin flaking off to reveal her mannequin leg. Her skin also flakes off on her arms, starting from her wrists due to having committed suicide.
• Jojos Bizarre Adventure: Played With.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: Introduces Ghosts and they bear the markings of their death. Reimi looks fairly healthy at first glance until she shows the fatal wound on her back which (though never showed to the audience) is implied to be quite hideous. Her dog Arnold, by contrast, has a nasty gash on his neck from where Kira killed him. Kira himself seems to play the trope straight at first, until he gradually realizes that he's dead and his ghost gains the wounds he had in life. Though as of Dead Man's Questions his form returns to a fairly healthy image, which includes reversing when he had another man's face grafted on a la Face/Off.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind: Polnareff is badly disfigured in this part and ends up dying with his spirit bound to the Stand Mr. President. Though his full body isn't seen, his ghostly form still retains the facial scarring and damaged eye he had while alive.
• Ghost Girl in Sgt. Frog died of a congenital illness in real life. As a ghost, she shows no signs of it.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, Suzuno is a dying old woman, who was once the Priestess of Byakko. When she dies, and is reunited with Tatara (her Love Interest from the time she was in the book), and she looks exactly as she did as a young girl.
• To Your Eternity: The elderly Pioran suffered from dementia towards the end of her life. When she dies, she gets her mind back and she looks like her younger self, shortly before she is reincarnated.

Comedy

• Discussed in Robin Williams' stand-up special Weapons Of Self-Destruction, as he dealt with Michael Jackson's then-recent death.
  Robin: Do you think that when you die and you get to the other side in the afterlife, they give you things you had in life? Like Michael got to the other side and it's like, "Michael?" "Yes?" "We have some of your things here." "Really?" "One African-American nose. Is this yours?" "Yes." "We have four others here. Are these yours?" "Three of them are mine. One's Latoya's."

Comic Books

• Cerebus the Aardvark: When Cerebus dies, he de-ages to his prime and stops being ill.
• ElfQuest: After One Eye is killed, his spirit is shown to still have an eyepatch for as long as his lifemate Clearbrook keeps his body in stasis - and more importantly, refuses to let him go in her grief. When she finally, truly lets him go and lets his body die, his spirit is shown to have two eyes once more.
• Justice Society of America: In a Secret Origins adaptation of the origin of the JSA, the Spectre sees that President Franklin D. Roosevelt no longer needs a wheelchair as he ascends into heaven.
• Supergirl: In Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, Kara Zor-El's disembodied soul still looks young and beautiful. Her bruises and wounds have vanished together with the hole that the Anti-Monitor blasted through her belly in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and she is wearing elegant winter clothes instead of her ragged and torn super-hero outfit.
• Titeuf: Discussed when where Titeuf and his cousin Julie see a dead cat on the road, Julie then explain him that the cat will go to heaven and that everyone who go there will be healed and look young again. at the end of the page Titeuf tell his friend François that it's useless to tear off mosquitoes' wings because they will gets new ones in heaven.

Comic Strips

• Played with in Life in Hell while pondering within one strip that if you lost a limb in life, it will be waiting for you in heaven.
• Cartoon tributes to a deceased disabled celebrity will often have them Throwing Off the Disability at the pearly gates, ie Ray Charles throwing away his sunglasses or Stephen Hawking leaving his wheelchair behind.

Fan Works

• The tale Strandpiel by A.A. Pessimal introduces the first Witch to be born into the Smith-Rhodes family. From an early age, Rebecka realises she has spirit guides to call on: ancestors on her mother's family line, who are delighted to have a family member they can actually talk to. In an inversion of this trope, she sees them taking the forms they feel most comfortable with. Johanna Livinia Smith-Rhodes, who founded the Family, demonstrates she could, if she so chooses, appear as a young woman in her twenties; but is most comfortable as a grey-haired matriarch in her early seventies, as she was when she died. Her daughter Johanna Cornelia Smith-Rhodes manifests as a woman with disfiguring facial scars, from a battle she survived when she took a Zulu spear straight through the face. Johanna Cornelia demonstrates to Bekki that she can appear as she used to look before she was wounded; but she's comfortable with the scarring and doesn't really see the point of correcting it.
• Maria's ghost in Echoes of Eternity doesn't have any of the Delicate and Sickly traits that she had in life.
• In The Addams Family fanfiction Gomez and the Sweet Hereafter, elderly versions of Gomez and Morticia die and go to the afterlife. When they're in the afterlife, both of them are young again.
• Not Completely, Altogether Here: Nessarose was born paralyzed from the waist down. In the afterlife, she can walk.
• The Bolt Chronicles: Those who enter Nirvana after their death in "The Gift" revert to a perfect physical state, which includes going back to what would be their ideal adult age. Bolt says he feels like a five-year-old pup again, while Mittens gets her claws back.
• The Arias and Sonnets of a Whimsical Land: When the elderly Ghost of High Heart passes away, she is reunited with her friend Jenny of Oldstones and notes that her body feels young again.
• The Bridge: Dr. Daisuke Serizawa has been wandering as a ghost and still has his eye patch. When he finally lets go of his pain due to his creation, Destroyah, becoming a hero, and moves on to the afterlife, he removes the patch and his lost eye regenerates.

Films — Animation

• In Grave of the Fireflies, the protagonist and his sister both starve to death. When depicted in spirit form, they're both healthy again.
• Marnie from When Marnie Was There is actually a Cute Ghost Girl. She died of old age and is actually Anna's grandmother who wanted to reunite with her granddaughter.
• In Coco, Frida Kahlo, who spent most of her life severely disabled from a bus accident, is presented as completely mobile in the afterlife. Interestingly, everyone else in the afterlife looks the age they died at, such as the children residents who still have the emotional maturity of living children and Coco herself, who appears as her elderly self after dying during the Time Skip and ascending to the afterlife. Also, while she appears older than how old her parents and husband were when they died, she's a lot more spry and physically mobile compared to her wheelchair-bound living self, as well as being way more mentally lucid when she'd been a Scatterbrained Senior during her last days alive.
• Corpse Bride: The residents of the Land of the Dead are perfectly healthy despite being in various states of injury or decay, up to just being Dem Bones. When the coachman Mayhew drops dead from his Incurable Cough of Death, he says that he feels better than he has in years upon arriving in the dead realm. It's implied that it's actually a type of Purgatory rather than Heaven, explaining why their appearance isn't healed.

Films — Live-Action

• Return of the Jedi: Anakin Skywalker shows up as a force ghost, along with Yoda and Obi-Wan, to show Luke that he has redeemed himself with his final moments. Before the prequel series, Anakin was portrayed by Darth Vader's character actor Sebastian Shaw outside of costume, without the injuries we saw him with after being unmasked. He was later portrayed by Hayden Christensen in every re-release of the film afterward, who was younger and healthier. Obi-Wan, on the other hand, remains portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness as he appears throughout the trilogy, even though there was the option to change him into Ewan McGregor.
• In Deadpool 2, the third time Wade is having a Near-Death Experience, he finally goes through the invisible wall to reach his dead girlfriend Vanessa. In doing so, he no longer looks like a mutant disfigured by cancer, but his original, handsome self.
• When the title character of Happy Gilmore is trying to find his happy place during the final game, he imagines Chubbs in Heaven. His severed hand has been restored. The Character Overlap in Little Nicky shows him restored so it looks like Happy's place was right.
• Scary Movie 2: Averted for laughs in the alternate ending where everyone but the Final Girl is revealed to be ghosts who died unawares during the film. Dwight is furious to realize that he's still wheelchair-bound in the afterlife.
  Dwight: This is bullshit!
• The Frighteners: Cyrus and Stu both appear healthy and happy after their ghostly forms are "killed" and they're finally sent up to heaven.
• Inverted but also played with in Beetlejuice, as spirits generally look the way they did at the moment of death, resulting in some varieties of Body Horror. But the Maitlands, ghostly protagonists of the film (who implicitly drowned after their car fell off a bridge), look perfectly alive and healthy.
• Implied to be the case in Heaven Is for Real, when young Colton recounts his experience of having gone to heaven while being briefly dead on the operating table. He mentions to his father Todd that he'd met "Pop," Todd's grandfather, who has been dead for several years. When Todd finds a photograph of his grandfather and asks Colton if this is the man he saw, Colton irritably replies, "No one wears glasses in heaven, Dad!"
• At the end of A Dog's Journey, Ethan and Bailey both pass on and meet in heaven, with Ethan as a healthy middle-aged man and Bailey as the Red Retriever he was most happy as.
• Discussed in The Heavenly Kid. After the title character Bobby dies, the woman behind him on the train starts coughing and asks in the raspiest voice imaginable "Got a light?" Later, this woman is told by attendants on the escalator going Uptown that her bodily ailments from her smoking will vanish when she arrives above. This does prompt Bobby to really want to go but he is Barred from the Afterlife.
• A post credits scene in Thor: Love and Thunder has Jane show up in Valhalla with none of her cancer symptoms.

Literature

• In the poem Rainbow Bridge it's mentioned that animals become fit and young again once they die.
  • At the conclusion of Marley & Me, author John Brogan tells his children something like this to try and ease their grief over Marley's passing.
• Warrior Cats: This occurs to Clan cats who go to StarClan. In StarClan, cats' illnesses disappear and they're presented as the age they were happiest in life (for instance, Yellowfang appears as the elder she was in ThunderClan, while Bluestar appears in her prime.)
• Delicate and Sickly Tobi dies early in Seeker Bears but is later shown much healthier as a spirit.
• In Philip José Farmer's Riverworld, the resurrected human population brought back after death on Earth are all forever twenty-five. Also, everybody is able-bodied; the disabled become abled, people born dwarves find they are suddenly of a normal height, and among other little quirks, the bald get to grow hair again...
• The afterlife of The Salvation War has everyone in their prime - including Hell.
• The Shivers (M. D. Spenser) book, "The Awful Apple Orchard", somehow plays this trope for horror. The protagonists, Daniel and Sara, escaped the titular orchard's cider plant after narrowly suffering a grisly fate via Ground by Gears, with Sara badly spraining her ankle in the process, barely able to walk without Daniel's assistance. In a later chapter, Daniel was unexpectedly woken by Sara in the dead of night where she tells him to follow her back to the plant, and somehow Sara can walk and pedal just fine. It turns out neither Daniel or Sara actually escaped, where they discovered their badly-pulped corpses in the machinery - being a ghost, Sara's leg injury has been negated completely.
• In The Wish List, an elderly man who has just been admitted into Heaven by St Peter gets visibly younger and healthier as he skips down the path towards the afterlife.
• In the Russian novel Light in the Window by Svyatoslav Loginov, afterlife is depicted as a boundless plane inhabited by the spirits of the deceased, who can shape it into anything they like by expending the memories that living people have of them. While all people arrive in the afterlife in the health state they died in, the first thing most spend their memories on is usually restoring their bodies to their prime condition, so there are mostly healthy, fit people running around afterlife.
• Evoked in The Fault in Our Stars. At Augustus's funeral, the minister says in the sermon that in heaven, Augustus will be "healed and whole." Hazel is offended by the notion that he wasn't "whole" just because he was sick and missing a leg.
• In Mort, one of Mort's first solo jobs as Death's apprentice is to attend the death of an elderly witch. After she dies, her spirit takes the form of a young, quite disturbingly attractive woman. Self-image is everything.
• Downplayed in The Cosmere. Healing or dying restores someone to how they view themselves, which covers recent injuries. Kelsier dies by broken neck, which is fixed in the afterlife, but he retains the scars he gained from the labor camp since both camp and scars played a heavy role in defining who he is. Similarly, the eunuch Sazed was castrated from birth, which isn't fixed upon ascending to godhood because he went his whole life without his... equipment.
• In Left Behind, those who are raptured and/or resurrected are restored to the prime of their adult lives without any evidence of disability or infirmity. Specifically, they are all fixed at thirty-three years old, since that was the age when Jesus died. This includes people who never reached thirty-three years of age in their mortal lives.
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry finds himself in an Afterlife Antechamber with all of his scars gone. Similarly, Dumbledore appears with his injured hand fully healed.

Live-Action TV

• One episode of The Golden Girls has Sophia going to heaven during a near-death experience. Although she's still an old woman, some of her ailments have been healed, and her false teeth have turned into real ones.
• One episode of Pose sees Pray Tell stuck in the hospital and convinced that he's dying. In one of the nicer hallucinations, he is reunited with his late lover Costas. When he was still alive, Costas was ravaged by the effects of AIDS, but here he is healthy and mobile again.
• In American Horror Story: 1984, Xavier, Montana, and Ray are all healed of their wounds in Purgatory.
• Ghost Whisperer: One episode revolves around the main characters trying to help the ghost of a severely autistic man pass on, which is harder than usual due to him being nonverbal. However, the ending shot implies that he sheds his disability upon passing to the afterlife, and earlier, Melinda had mentioned that "souls are perfect", so apparently this only happens when they move on from their earthly ties.
• Supernatural: Pamela Barnes' eyes were burned out of her head. She is eventually killed. In "Dark Side of the Moon", Sam and Dean are sent to Heaven and run into Pamela, whose eyes have been restored.

Music

• The quandary is discussed in the Crash Test Dummies song "God Shuffled his Feet":
  And if your eye got poked out in this life
  Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology: Usually averted. Hades is the Underworld of those who died in battle, and they still bear the wounds that killed them. In some versions of the Orpheus myth, Orpheus's tragic backward glance at Eurydice takes place because Eurydice's foot is lame from the snakebite that killed her — she lags behind Orpheus as he leads her upward, so he reemerges into the living world before she does and looks back a moment too soon.
• In Islam, it's mentioned that everyone will be around 25 (i.e. age of prime) in the afterlife, whether it's heaven or hell.
• Christianity:
  • Mormonism teaches that all post-mortal spirits and resurrected beings are in their perfect form, though their state of being depends on what they did during this life.
  • In Christianity, it is believed that there is no sickness in Heaven. One of the best-known and most frequently used Orthodox prayers for the departed is "Rest with the saints, O Christ, the soul of Thy servant, where there is neither sickness, nor sadness, nor sighing, but endless life". The Book of Revelation also states that after the Second Coming of Christ, when the righteous get resurrected for their eternal reward, "there shall be no more pain/sickness [depending on the translation], for the former things have passed".

Podcasts

• Implied to be the case with Magnus in the Distant Finale of The Adventure Zone: Balance, and explicitly said of his dogs.

Tabletop Games

• This is generally the case in Dungeons & Dragons. If someone dies and becomes some form of Undead, they might retain old wounds, but if they pass on to the afterlife they generally become what's known as a Petitioner, which takes on the form they had in life, but typically as a healthy adult, with some modifications based on the Plane and Deity their soul went to.

Theatre

• In Ride the Cyclone, Ricky Potts loses his neurodegenerative disease upon entering limbo. In his life, he was mute (yet still a member of the choir) and mostly immobile, requiring crutches to walk. When he and the rest of the choir enters limbo, he shocks the rest of them by speaking for the first time and tosses away his crutches.
  • Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case for Jane Doe. She was completely decapitated in the accident that killed the rest of the choir. Since, in limbo, she has completely black eyes, a face of porcelain skin, and carries around a headless doll, it can be implied she's just wearing the doll's head in lieu of her own. That would mean her injuries didn't heal upon entering limbo, as opposed to the rest of the choir, who became completely healthy again.

Video Games

• In Fate Series, "Heroic Spirits" (notable souls of history, myth, or old-fiction), when summoned as "Servants" (i.e "souls" given a body out of mana), tend to be taken from their prime, i.e relatively young and healthy. Okita Souji (a member of The Shinsengumi, class Saber), however, is a subversion — she's well known for being sickly (with tuberculosis) and dying young because of it that it becomes part of her "legend" and as such, even as a Heroic Spirit, she still has her sickness (it's even a skill called "Weak Constitution"), even if it won't kill her. Similarly, Nero Claudius still suffers from migraines and Benienma is still missing her tongue as Heroic Spirits because those traits were part of their legends. Professor James Moriarty frequently complains about being summoned as a middle-aged man with back problems. Sugitani Zenjubou still has scars around the neck after being executed by decapitation.
• For most of Leifeng Pagoda, the hero Xu Meng-jiao is a fifteen-year-old Demon Slayer on a quest to release his mother, the Lady Whitesnake Bai Suzhen from the titular tower, which he succeeds in the final stage. The Distant Finale sixty years later then sees a white-haired, elderly Meng-jiao remembering his past, before he joins Bai Suzhen (implied to have died in the interim) in the heavens, back in his teenage self from the actual game.

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick: While Roy's father is as old and curmudgeonly in heaven as he was in life, Roy's mother is far younger than he ever remembered her. It's explained as people's personalities shaping their appearance — she never stopped thinking of herself as 19, while Eugene had been a grumpy old man on the inside for most of his life. Roy also meets his grandfather Horace, the warrior who originally owned Roy's signature greatsword, and he looks to be middle-aged, which ironically still makes him look much younger than his son.
• Implied to be the case in Slightly Damned as Death explains that those who die and get sent to hell retain any injuries they received when they died.
• Homestuck: Zig-Zagged. Sburb players who die are either reborn as their dream selves, or sent to the dream bubbles if they don't have a dream self, where they are healed of the injury that killed them, and usually appear as an idealized version of themselves, though this isn't always the case. Tavros regains the use of his legs after death, but Terezi's dead alternate selves are still blind because she considers her blindness to be an essential part of herself, and when Caliborn becomes a God Tier (where death is the main requirement), he still has a prosthetic leg, likely because he also considers it to be an essential part of himself. Meanwhile, Equius's horns and teeth are still broken, and the Pre-Scratch Trolls still have their disabilities (for example, Meulin is still deaf, and Mituna still suffers from his traumatic brain injury).

Web Videos

• Discussed in Dragon Ball Z Abridged. Super Saiyan 2 Gohan dismisses one of the Cell Jr's attempts to use Krillin as a hostage by pointing out that all killing him would accomplish is getting him a free ice cream sundae for dying three times before being brought back by the Dragon Balls. When Krillin weakly points out that he's lactose intolerant, Gohan gives the very Gokuesque response of "nobody's lactose intolerant in Heaven, Krillin. That's why it's Heaven."

Western Animation

• In the final season of Samurai Jack, the Scotsman (now an old man in a wheelchair) sacrifices himself in order to ensure that his daughters could safely escape Aku's wrath. He almost immediately comes back as a ghost thanks to the magical Celtic runes on his sword, looking exactly the same as he did back in the earlier seasons (which he lampshades). However, the Scotsman's ghost still has the machine gun peg leg of his youth.
• The Legend of Korra: Avatar Wan's spirit appears to Korra in his prime, despite dying as an old man from battlefield wounds.
• In one of the final episodes of Star Wars Rebels, Hera feels (or imagines) her shoulder being held by Kanan's ghost, who bears his appearance from the first half of the show instead of his appearance from the second half of the show or even his last haircut from right before his death. He also isn't blind, which he was for the last half of the show (unless you think the color returning to his eyes when he died meant something).
• Family Guy: Defied when the guys visit God to ask why he keeps screwing over the New England Patriots, and Joe is frustrated to discover a handicap spot sign in Heaven.
  God: Oh yeah, you're like that forever.
• Steven Universe: Sadie's song "G-G-G-Ghost" is about a girl who thinks she suddenly recovered from her illness, but realizes it actually killed her already.
  I used to be sick, sick and tired
  Delirious, dizzy, terrified
  But I'm suddenly up and out of bed
  You'd never believe I was almost...
  Why can't you see me?
• Disenchantment: Jerry — the dim-witted servant of the Maru royal family — is revealed to be the youngest prince of Maru, but has brain damage as a result of his older siblings screwing a cursed crown onto his head when he was little. In Season 2, he sacrifices himself so that his niece Bean can escape, and is later shown in Heaven being far more erudite and articulate than he was in life.
• Played with in the Adventure Time: Distant Lands special "Together Again". After dying, Finn's initial form in the dead worlds retains his old age and the metal arm he had when he kicked the bucket, averting this trope. After it's explained to Finn that in the dead worlds, one can have any appearance they've had when alive (including past incarnations), Finn chose the form of his teenage self, but with the particular metal arm he had in the later seasons, partially defying this trope because that form is "recognizable".
• Yara from Human Resources becomes young again and seems to no longer be senile as she passed on to Heaven.

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