“It soothed me to imagine a cavernous space inside the earth where missing or lost valuables—the cracked teapots, broken dolls, torn photos, bronzed baby shoes, dead turtles—made their habitation, a place where all our losses came to rest. I was not sure the dead lived among these things, but I was perfectly willing to suppose that they did or that they at least stopped in, as if visiting a ghostly pawnshop, to retrieve what had once, through”