After death, I will lose my opportunity to complain, so I will accept everything with love.

— Debasish Mridha

And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.

— H. Rider Haggard

At the end of life, nobody knows where the spirit goes.

— Lailah Gifty Akita

[Charlie is dying:]After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said. But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven. Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into. In an instant the Medieval team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it.“Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.” But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time. The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Alana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth. Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage. Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue. “So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly.”The afterlife.”My God, it’s so beautiful.

— Edward Fahey

Decades after little Colleen’s death, my sister Kathy still loves her daughter dearly. Colleen was born with cerebral palsy. She died in Kath’s arms in a rocking chair at the age of six. They were listening to a music box that looked very much like a smiling pink bunny. The opening quote in this book, “I will love you forever, but I’ll only miss you for the rest of my life,” is from Kath’s nightly prayers to her child. Colleen couldn’t really talk or walk very well, but loved untying my mother’s tennis shoes and then laughing. When Mom died decades later we sent her off in tennis shoes, so Colleen would have something to untie in Heaven. In the meantime, Dad had probably been taking perfect care of her up there. He must have been aching to hug her for all of her six years on earth. Mom’s spirit comes back to play with great-grandchildren she’d never met or had a chance to love while she was still – I almost said “among the living.” In my family, though, the dead don’t always stay that way. You can be among the living without technically being alive. Mom comes back to play, but Dad shows up only in emergencies. They are both watching over their loved ones.“The Mourning After” is dedicated to all those we have had the joy of loving before they’ve slipped away to the other side. It then celebrates the joy of re-unions.

— Edward Fahey

Do I have anything to lose? This life will be gone one day to the Creator who gave it.

— Lailah Gifty Akita

Hasn’t stopped us before. And besides, if they wanted to kill us, we’d be dead by now and would be having an entirely different conversation. I wonder if I’d still be mad at you, or if we would talk in words or pictures. Maybe in smells. That would be cool.” -Banco

— Maria V. Snyder

Have you ever loved someone so intensely, so entirely, that it's painful to be apart from them? I'm not talking about being in a long-distance relationship or even a particularly painful case of unrequited love. I'm talking about being in a completely different world from the other person, a world where you can see them and hear them, but you can't touch them, and they can't see or hear you.

— Stacey Field

He gave everything to everybody. Except to me.

— J.K. Rowling

I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering… I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by, and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be? You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know.(pp.174-175)

— Michael Zadoorian