I'm Italy Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

I've always loved those late night discussions about the afterlife, where we imagine reuniting

all our favorite people, all our favorite things.

Our beloved childhood dog comes running through the green fields.

The sweetest grandfather arrives feeling no pain at all.

There's got to be friends in the afterlife, and chocolate, and poems.

Today's philosophical poem imagines that kind of afterlife.

I love this poem because it makes me viscerally feel what it might be like to have all my

loved ones reunited once again.

In the end you get everything back, Liza Manelli, by Jason Schneidermann.

The afterlife is an infinity of custom shelving, where everything you have ever loved has a

perfect place, including things that don't fit on shelves, like the weeping willow from

your parents' backyard, or an old boyfriend, exactly as he was in your second year of

college, or an aria you love, but without the rest of the opera you don't particularly

care for.

My favorite joke, Q, you know who dies?

A, everyone, because it's true.

But ask any doctor, and they'll say that prolonging a life is saving a life.

Anyone who survives their surgeries, and they'll say yes, to keep living is to be saved.

I do think there's a statute of limitations on grief, like certainly how someone died

can be sad forever.

But who can be sad simply about the fact that Shakespeare say is dead, or Sappho, or

...