Or: I spent the last 2 days reading Kevin Brockmeier’s A Brief History of the Dead, in which people who have died live in a city (ostensibly it is either THE afterlife or a step along the way) where they continue to reside as long as someone alive on earth remembers them. When there ceases to be someone alive on earth to remember them, they depart from The City. Like the other Brockmeier novel I’ve read, The Illumination, it’s a slightly magical story about connectedness and how we are tied to each other in a million more ways than we realize. Of course, I didn’t know this when I picked up the book yesterday morning. All I knew was that I liked the author’s other work and wanted to check this one out.

The Brief History of the Dead is a gorgeous, mesmerizing, occasionally frightening book, and I would have loved it no matter when I read it. But I happened to read it the weekend of 9/11, when I was already thinking about loss and memory and connectedness, and the more time I spent with it, the more perfect it seemed.

When you don’t have a religious practice, you miss out on all the ritualized framework it provides for dealing with difficult moments. I didn’t go to church or to a public ceremony this weekend to think about 9/11 or to ponder the meaning of life and death and what might happen after. I didn’t even tune into the TV coverage. I didn’t need to. I had a book, a book that presented itself to me at just the right moment, as books always seem to do, and if that’s the big thing I believe in, I’m happy with it.