When soldiers part ways at wars’ end, the breakup of a platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person; the final bloodless death of the war. The same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its door on its final evening or Congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away, feeling that they were just part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life, even though they can’t quite put a finger on it.

In this way, death is not only for just humans but for anything that existed. And it turns out that anything that enjoys a life has an afterlife: platoons and plays and stores and congresses, they don’t end. They just move on to a different dimension.

Although it is difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy a delicious afterlife together, exchanging stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, just like humans, lament the brevity of life. It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them but the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. After all, you don’t bring your kidney or liver or your heart into the afterlife with you; instead you gain independence from the pieces that make you up.

A consequence of this cosmic scheme is going to surprise you: when you die you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. I mean, they hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen but with your death, they don’t die, instead they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, actually haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.

-David Eagleman, Ineffable, from Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives