Margaret, my wife’s grandmother, was still in her home two days after her death when Maria and I arrived in the village of Cruglic, Moldova. Cruglic has been slower to change than most of the rest of the world. Indoor plumbing is a novelty of the last decades, cars and tractors are a new luxury, the rhythms of the seasons and connectedness to the land are still the foundation of small-town communities. 

And living with the dead is a part of life, not that different than it would have been in the West a hundred or even a thousand years ago.