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In Judaism, when a person dies, it’s customary to say to the bereaved “May their memory be a blessing.”

I always loved this. Whereas telling someone “Sorry for your loss” feels a little useless and empty, the Jewish refrain feels instructive for how to survive the loss—through memory. Recollection is not just a blessing. It is a lifeline to immortality. It is how we hold close the people we love but who are no longer with us. It is how, in my experience, we survive loss.

The idea that the dead exist beyond their earthly time is rooted in many cultures and traditions: In fact, outside of the West—in Latin America, in East and Southeast Asia, in Africa, in Oceanic cultures as well as in many Black traditions in the United States—ancestors are not distant names etched on a grave or in a family tree but a continued presence in the lives of the living. The relationship between the living and the dead is different from the relationship among the living, but it remains a relationship nonetheless.

In After Life, we witness how various people react to the tragically early death of Crane. Some people who hardly knew her, like Nick Flores and Arnold King, find meaning in her death, while others, like her mother, shut themselves off from her memory, an effort to stave off pain that only increases it. But her sister Melissa’s relationship with continues through death, because for Melissa, the wall between life and death is more of a diaphanous veil.

Is the who Melissa’s been talking to all these years some sort of ghost, or a part of that lives in Melissa, or something else entirely? I find the question irrelevant. What matters is that to Melissa, is alive, and the love and support of a big sister survives, even grows. This love has the power to bring comfort and joy not yoked to a physical presence. Somewhere in there is a suggestion for how we might look to other traditions to better marry life and its inevitable end together.

At the same time, I write these words as the mother of daughters, young women who I love with a ferocity that sometimes takes my breath away. I can scarcely allow myself to imagine a sliver of the pain of losing them, of surviving a life taken too soon. And so, to all the mothers, fathers, siblings, relatives, and friends who have lost someone out of order, too soon, I send you all the love in my heart and I dedicate this book to you.