I honestly don't think about it too much. I wonder about what it's like to die, and I've pondered the immense nothingness that could be out there -- will it be like being asleep? where things are so deep and dark you don't even realize you're asleep until you wake up? Will that waking be a new life, like a reincarnation? -- but that's about the extent of things.
I am also not particularly religious, which feeds into this 'meh' feeling about the afterlife. If I were religious, I do not doubt that I'd have lots of feelings and opinions about the afterlife.
Perhaps I will, someday.
For now, I'm happy with the life I have, a life I love living, and so I'm not so worried about what happens after.
None of these things change the fact that Kevin Brockmeier's vision of the afterlife is a masterful creation, a deep pondering of what it means to live and remember and love.
I quite literally judged this book by the cover.
A fellow teacher and I were perusing our library with a student, just walking along and pulling books out at random to discuss or recommend.
I saw this one and liked the title, so I plucked it from the shelf, and when I liked the weird cover picture, into my back for summer reading it went.
That was it. No one recommended it or anything; A Brief History of the Dead just sort of fell into my lap.
The concept yanked me as soon as I opened it, and I was not disappointed.
In this book, people die just like in any other. But here, as long as someone still alive remembers you, you stay in some sort of afterlife 'limbo' until they, too, die (or forget you). It doesn't have to be that someone remembers your name, or your profession, or where you lived -- no, they just have to remember you, your existence.
Those who are dead but remembered live in a large, almost infinite city, and oddly enough, they know they are dead; they also know they are remembered. This leads to some frankly fascinating conversations about what they think the afterlife might be like -- like most people, they believe there is something after this never-ending city of memory.
The plot alternates perspectives, sometimes focused on Luka Sims, a journalism professor who was killed in a car accident and now resides in the city as its only newspaper publisher, and sometimes focused on Laura Byrd, a young woman who was sent to the Antarctic on a research expedition. Other characters, other lives, intermix with these, but the story consistently returns to their experiences, and they are by far the most empathetic of the characters.
As it turns out, the city is gradually emptying of citizens; eventually, by interrogating new arrivals before they inevitably vanish, the dead realize that, among the living, there is a viral epidemic that kills something like 99-100% of people it infects. In short, the population of Earth is plummeting, and thus there are few people left to remember those who have died, those who still live in the city.
Only a few living people seem to be holding the city of the dead together, and that's when the novel starts to get really interesting -- so I won't give anything else away.
It's a great book -- a unique reading experience of mystery combined with the poetic narcissism of everyone wondering who, exactly, still remembers them on earth. It's quite beautiful, actually -- part of the human experience is wanting to leave a legacy in some form, whether it's through having children or changing the world or writing or what have you.
I know I've thought about what I will leave behind someday, and this book taps into that. I wonder, now more than ever, who will remember me when I'm gone. And if this city of the dead could exist, if this odd combination of purgatory and limbo really did exist, who might be there only because I remember them?
I will never know just how far-reaching my life is, like everyone else. The ripples of my life are likely insignificant in the grand scheme of time.
But in this book, that doesn't seem so heartbreaking or depressing as it might. Instead, it makes me feel more like a member of humanity, one who has lived and will die and is thus just like everyone else. There's unity, comfort, in that.
This book also emphasizes just how wide-spread our lives are -- at one point, a character estimates that any random individual has met roughly 40,000 people in his or her life, from immediate family members and intimate friends to the mailman whose face you just barely remember as he drives by each day. Every person in your life... and it adds up to around 40,000.
Reading this book makes me wonder if that's true. Did Brockmeier keep a list like the character in his story until he had an approximation of every human interaction in a person's life?
I would never imagine that I've encountered 40,000 people in my life (or that I will, by the time it's over), but maybe I have. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll remember them, and maybe they'll remember me.
The Brief History of the Dead is not just about the dead; it's about the living and what inspires us to keep going, to remember those who've passed with honor and make our own lives worth remembering.
I never expected to get this experience from a random choice in my school library, but I'm glad I did. Take a chance, like I did, and maybe, someday, I'll be in the city because you'll remember me.
