When I was ten, I went to my grandmother’s funeral. I remember watching my relatives mixing and whispering to each other in low, respectful tones. For a moment I didn’t see any faces, but only their souls moving about in the confines of that funeral home’s parlor. I refused to accept that my grandmother had ceased to exist, recognizing only the presence of these souls. I simply decided that she had gone to another place. I was too young to be affected emotionally by the vision, or even by the sight of my grandmother’s dead body in her casket. I’m older now, and the weight of suffering and death weighs heavier on my heart, but the notion that peoples’ souls are eternal has never left me. My friends are my most precious claims in life. In the end, it’s the realization that I hold so little of these claims that pushes me into the deepest place of my sorrows.