Read Online My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares - Free Book Online Page B

again. She needed to want to find me, too, and she had every reason to stay a long way away.
    DEATH IS AN UNKNOWABLE PLACE, but I have learned something about it over time. My state of consciousness after death and before birth is not like the normal state of waking and living, but I do have perceptions and memories from those times. It’s hard for me to gauge how time passes in those dark transitions. I can’t tell if it’s one month or ten. Or nine, maybe.
    Being as I am the custodian of this long, strange memory and one of the few people on earth who can report back from death, I’ve felt a sense of responsibility to keep track of how it works and try to understand it better. I’m not sure who will be the beneficiary of this long study of mine, or whether it will ever be any benefit at all, but it’s what I do. Recording is not the same as doing, my old friend Ben would tell me, remembering is not the same as living, but the older I get the more it seems to me the best of what little I have to offer.
    I can tell you the feeling of dying into a community of souls. It’s when you understand you are no longer alive but you feel other beings around you, and it is profoundly comforting. People you might have known to some degree or other, who know and care about you, are with you. You don’t talk to them or communicate in any explicit way, but you know you are not alone and that they will somehow keep you. You aren’t capable of asking questions in this state, but there is a condition of knowing.
    I also know the feeling of dying into emptiness. We all die alone, but this is different. You apprehend nothing and nothingness. You have the sense of wandering, and it can go on for a very long time. You find yourself yearning, almost hungering, for the presence of another being.
    There’s a pattern in it. Your death is the shadow of your life. If you have strong and loving attachments in your life, you will cohere to your community of souls. You will probably come back to life quickly and among your own people. Your lives will occur in clusters geographically and ethnically. When you go to a new place, you’ll often migrate among your loved ones. If your community is ethnically mixed, you’re more likely to change race, and if not you probably won’t.
    If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death. You’ll die into nothingness and come back among strangers or very occasionally among enemies. And you’ll stay alone and at odds until you don’t want it anymore. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to find any kind of community, much less a desired one. As I see it, this effort is both the penance and the rehabilitation. You will come back, but it takes a while. You will remain among strangers until you’ve made yourself some kind of family. It won’t happen until you want it to.
    I don’t know about heaven and hell, and I haven’t met God yet. But I have to admire the design.
    Your will is operative between lives, but not in the way you are accustomed to. In death I think you tune in to the highest frequency of your will, and it’s a sound you rarely hear in life because it is drowned out by the noise of living—by your particular place in the world and the short-term desires of your body. In death you are temporarily free from the rough grip of time. Your slate is wiped clean, you’ve got no stake anymore, so your will operates without pull or prejudice. Somewhere expressed in your highest will is a desire to pay your debts and balance yourself out. And though this balance is deeply salubrious to the soul, it doesn’t necessarily bring any comfort or pleasure to a living body.
    There are limits to your will, of course—like the expression of other people’s wills. Which is why my story would be a lot shorter and more cheerful if I had simply loved Sophia from the start and found some way to make her love me. I wouldn’t have spent more than a