I don’t believe in resurrection, and in fact a very big sticking point of my childhood was a recurring dream in which forties-era Japanese bombers would come down over the city on an otherwise unassuming day and kill me in my bedroom. Then I would be dead forever, and this was bad because I would have missed school the next day. I say this not to alarm you with the severity of my early fascination with death but to reiterate again my lack of belief in this sort of thing.
When my grandfather died I did not know how to recite the prayers, and they would only carry his coffin out to the incinerator after my grandmother had left the morgue. Otherwise his soul would go looking for her, they said, and he’d never make it to the afterlife. I thought this a romantic notion, but with you I dreamt of different things entirely. Namely I believed that when I died, I would be reincarnated into a cat in some sort of suburban household in Middle America: a house with a front lawn and slow birds on the trees. And you would be there also, small and thoughtless like me; and we would nap together in the sun and stay happy for however long household cats tended to live.