Once, staring at a stained glass installation, my parents and I argued about its basic shapes. There were concentric circles in white, orange, and yellow. A fish’s eye, I thought. But maybe a nipple, or a fried egg. It was in a church, though this particular panel was abstract images. Pope Gregory called art, biblical art, “books for the illiterate,” and isn’t that what a window is for anyway? To see something else through what would otherwise be a wall in the way.

A wall isn’t just a wall, a book isn’t just a collection of pages. These are canvases, the vessel has meaning of its own and in conjunction with its contents. It’s misleading to even suggest the contents could exist without the context of the vessel. We seem to feel this knowing keenly at times—what is a tomb? what’s in a name?—and lose touch with it in others. It’s just a movie. Can we just watch it, please?

But once you start noticing, it’s hard to stop. The wallpaper peels up at the corner and we start to wonder about the whole room. This is the meeting of the material and metaphysical, and I suppose that’s what we mean about the spiritual: it’s a thing that is experienced, here on our earth, now. There’s something tangled up in all this about the self and the collective. Is that what community is? A structure for conducting the relationship between the self and the collective? When my cousin died, my mother managed to sit through the mass but the incense made her cough. When we laughed about the fried egg window, she coughed.

The Egyptians wanted to be buried with their treasures. They wanted to make sure things were squared away for whatever was next, that they had what they might need. It mattered what happened to the material body after they left it, so they relied on each other to take care of business after they died. The styling of things wasn’t just fashion (as if we could be so dismissive), or superstition, or a matter of personal preference. No choice gets to be neutral. That’s not how it works. A choice of something is a rejection of another thing. No way around it. Same for choosing not to act or to accept the status quo or to run or to hide or to play “Ashokan Farewell” from my phone because my mother once told my sister she might like it played when she dies.

Style—which is to say, choice—is everywhere, staining practices all over the world. What we do or don’t with ashes, like my mother’s. Shrines and altars and shelves and niches and the drawers of our bedside tables. The Egyptians thought having one’s name written down essential to the afterlife. It was part of how the spirit would be recognized over there, on that side. There’d need to be something Sharpied on the tag that would pin your soul back to your body, HELLO MY NAME IS. Have them play a song that seems correct, and don’t play any that don’t.

Egyptian priests spoke spells over the mummified dead. Words, words would reanimate what would need woken up in the next life. They’d prepare and pack away your limbs and some potables, supplies, and special objects that might make you more comfortable. What is any funerary text but a spell? Maybe we can sketch a map for you, on your way out the door. Maybe we can will some instructions into being for the rest of us, not yet to the threshold. Isn’t it nice to have something to read on the plane? Maybe I’ll see you when I land, Cathy.

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