Chapter One

One

Now that I have died, I see all and know all, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Before, the frustration would’ve been intolerable, but the instruction would’ve been the same—let things go from your hands, watch them land where they will and be glad, be decent and do your best, take care of those who love you, make your bed, do the nastiest job of the day first—no lessons that require divine revelation, you see, only common sense, nothing supernatural. Consider how jangled the world would be if our judgment from beyond continued to mean anything. Not to say that having the power to reach down into lives to lift burdens and simplify sticky situations wouldn’t be thrilling. From all indications, though, it wouldn’t be the best use of a brief allotment of time and imaginative longing to consider our leaving as anything other than a final journey. And take a tip— memories are all we’re capable of offering in the way of influence.

People who have loved us tend to leave the rooms we lie in committed to do more, see more, and so be able to die sometime in the distant future with more honor and fewer regrets than they believe we took with us. They can wonder so intently at the meaning of it all that an answer which may have been stranded inside them, abandoned, or atrophied from disuse will finally, suddenly, make itself heard. Despite their conviction that intimations of how to live better lives felt far too urgent and true to have arisen from any ordinary thing, lessons that matter always come on the heels of the simple act of remembering words and acts of love given to them by the pe